Company leader
Guillaume de Zwirek
Co-founder and CEO
Artera
Guillaume de Zwirek is co-founder and chief executive of Artera, a Santa Barbara, California company that makes patient messaging software for health systems. A health system uses it so its patients get reminders, intake links, and answers by text, email, or voice from one place. A classical guitarist turned Ironman triathlete, he found the idea after collapsing in a race.
A Classical Guitarist
He grew up in Canada. His mother is a physician and his father a software engineer. He trained seriously as a classical guitarist. "I didn't want to be a musician. The problem is I was really good at it, and I was good at it because of the discipline," he said. "My mom demanded perfection." After finishing a music degree he talked a dean into letting him keep his scholarship and add a business degree in one more year.
Google and Santa Barbara
He landed a Google internship with an application built around being a musician, and he worked in product marketing at Google from 2010 to 2013. He then joined Graphiq, a data startup in Santa Barbara.
Collapsing at Ironman Texas
At Graphiq he took up triathlon. "Instead of working a hundred hours a week, I worked 60 hours and I worked out 40 hours," he said. Chasing a sub-nine-hour Ironman, he passed out from heatstroke at Ironman Texas with an internal temperature of about 104 degrees and woke in an ambulance. The care was good, but the calls and paperwork after discharge showed him how hard it was for patients to reach their providers.
He and Joe Tischler founded WELL Health in 2015, paying for the start with his savings and $20,000 each from 10 friends. WELL went through the Cedars-Sinai accelerator run with Techstars in 2016, moved to Santa Barbara in 2017, and renamed itself Artera in October 2022. Lead Edge Capital led a $65 million growth round in December 2025, and Oracle Health and MEDITECH now sell patient messaging products built on Artera.