Christos Zoukos (Stern ‘25) studied software engineering at NYU, then spent years in London working in consulting before coming back for business school. Georgia Lytra spent seven or eight years building and implementing tools inside the pharma industry before deciding it was time to build her own. Together with Andreas Chatzopoulos and Nicholas Patas, they're building Altrovia: a platform that helps pharma companies catch the design flaws in clinical trials before they turn into the amendments that waste years and millions of dollars.

Tell us about yourselves, apart from Altrovia.

Christos: NYU undergrad, software engineering. Then I moved to London for consulting for a few years, came back for my MBA at Stern. Stern's been a great experience on its own, but getting to actually apply that learning throughout the Startup Accelerator Program, put it to work on something real, that part's been incomparable. Georgia and I became close friends while she was in London, that's really where all of this started. I always knew I wanted to start something eventually, I just didn't know what.

Georgia: I spent seven years in the industry, building and implementing tools for pharma. That gave me a front-row seat to how messy everything actually is. At some point I realized I was good at the execution side of it, and I'd learned everything I could where I was. It felt like now or never, so I went for it.

Andreas: I had very little corporate experience going in. What got me was the direct impact, actually seeing something get built day to day instead of the pace you get most other places. I'd call it startup fever, it's been going around the last two or three years. It started as a learning experience and turned into something I actually see myself doing long term.

Give us Altrovia’s one-line pitch.

Georgia: We want more successful treatments to actually reach patients. Most drugs that fail in trials don't fail because the science was wrong, they fail because the trial wasn't planned right. If we can move that number even a little, that's real lives.

Has anything changed since Bootcamp and Sprint?

Christos: The vision hasn't changed. Who we sell to has, completely. We started out thinking CROs made sense as a customer, then thought maybe it was the medical writers drafting the trial documents. Now we know it's the decision-makers actually overseeing the trial. That shift is basically the whole story of this program for us.

Do you have a real-world example of the model working?

Georgia: We ran our model retroactively against a live Phase 3 oncology trial for a top-5 sponsor and correctly predicted 3 of the 8 amendments that trial actually went through, with modeled savings of roughly $39M and a timeline about two years faster.

What's the most surprising thing you've learned?

Georgia: Customers kept telling me how bad things were, and I kept thinking, “Surely, it can’t actually be that bad.” Turns out, it absolutely can. And somehow, I’m still surprised by it.

What's a moment you're still proud of?

Christos: Winning Pfizer’s Start4Health award. We genuinely didn't expect it, we thought we might place second at best. When they put our name on it, that was a real moment.

Who came up with the name?

Christos: We landed on it together. We wanted something starting with A, partly because if you look at it, the A reads a little like an AI, even though we don't lead with AI anywhere on the site. We'd rather keep that subtle.

Georgia: The name has Latin roots: via means “way” or “path,” and altro traces back to alter, meaning “another.” So Altrovia is essentially “another way”, and in healthcare, perhaps another life. A little philosophical, but we like it!

What's next after SLP?

Christos: Converting our existing pilots into paying customers, that's priority one. Fundraising comes after that.

What's your advice for someone thinking about starting something?

Georgia: Ideas are the easy part, everyone has good ones. It's the execution, the day-to-day grind, that nobody really prepares you for. And honestly, I think a lot of the current startup hype, people glamorizing dropping out, chasing whatever's trendy, is kind of toxic. It's always been hard, and it should be. 

Christos: The other thing is the team. You can have the idea, but if the people around you aren't on the same page, you have nothing. The most important trait we look for isn't even skill, it's whether someone actually feels the pain of the problem.