Useful from the Start

Today I’m excited to announce that we are publicly sharing news about my new company, Bionic Health. The mission of the company is to bring precision medicine to the masses. For those that have followed my entrepreneurial journey, Bionic may seem like a departure from the technology-centric companies I’ve built in the past. With both Automated Insights (the first commercial generative AI company in 2010) and Infinia ML (one of the first ML-focused startups in 2017), we built the proverbial hammer (technology) in search of nails (customers). We started with a technology and tried to find a market to apply it to. This is a hard way to build a business because you aren’t starting with a customer problem but a solution that can hopefully solve a problem.

With my next venture, I wanted not to repeat that mistake. I wanted to start a company that was useful from the start to some number of people. Out of the gate, I wanted the company to impact people’s lives in a meaningful way. I took a strong interest in doing something in healthcare. Everyone is concerned at some level about their health and improving it.

Since I’ve never worked in healthcare, I approached the smartest person I knew in the field, Dr. Jared Pelo, in the summer of 2022. I got to know Jared when he was building his first company, iScribes. He asked me to join his board of directors as their independent board member, which I did in 2016. Jared was trying to automate the doctor note writing process by recording patient visits and automatically transcribing them, but before we could fully realize the mission, Nuance Communications acquired the company. Shortly after that, Microsoft bought Nuance, where Jared’s worked for the last couple of years.

Jared and I started with first principles when looking at the healthcare experience for both patients and doctors. Why was it so bad? While there was a lot of “low-hanging fruit” we decided we wanted to go after a big swing. There were two big trends we saw that could be a game changer for the healthcare experience.

Read about those trends on the Bionic Blog….