Before Alessandro Sappia became a novelist, he spent eight years building a medical technology company. He has described that period as an intense stretch of creating something from the ground up, dealing with the pressures of startup life, and eventually reaching a point where he wanted to process the experience through fiction.
The result was Silicon Heartbeats, his debut literary novel about a founder building an artificial intelligence-powered diagnostics company in Silicon Valley. The characters and company are fictional, but Sappia’s professional history gives him firsthand knowledge of the environment in which Alex Mercer’s story unfolds.
Eight Years Inside Medical Technology
Sappia has publicly described spending eight years building a med-tech startup before leaving that chapter of his career behind. Independent reporting from 2016 identifies him as the founder and CEO of Biotechware, an Italian startup working in telecardiology.
