This week on Business is Boring, Simon Pound speaks to Pavan Vyas, CEO of Rush, about how they built the contact tracing app we’ve been using for the last year.

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You might not know it, but you probably have an app on your phone that Pavan Vyas had a hand in building – and hopefully you use it every day. He’s the CEO of Rush, makers of NZ Covid Tracer, an app which was brought to market in crisis response speed in May 2020, and which has since been improved on to the point it was adopted by the NHS in the UK.

The interesting thing is that they started working on the project long before lockdown. Vyas spotted the upcoming crisis and set teams to work on trying to solve potential problems using technology. One of those projects became the app, and when the call went out for technology, the customer research they had already done helped prove theirs was the best placed option to work.

It’s not unusual for Rush to have their work in front of millions. They count Google, Disney Plus and Microsoft as customers for their digital and technology offering. As CEO, Vyas has grown the company four-fold to a team of nearly 100. He joined the company from a background in big four consulting, venture investing and study at Oxford University. To talk about his journey, international success and what’s next, he joined Business is Boring for a chat.