Lotus Health AI raises $41M to deliver free AI-powered primary care direct to consumers

of that

property tax?

You don't get Yeah, maybe no property tax because you can't possibly not pay income tax on the revenue that's generated from a data center. That would be a crazy crazy thing. Um, but we will see. Uh, but our next guest is in the reream waiting room. We have KJ from Lotus AI. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you.

I'm doing great. Doing great. Good to see you guys too.

Thanks so much for hopping on. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

Yeah. My name is KJ Dollywal. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Lotus Health AI.

Yeah.

We are building an AI doctor powered by real doctors.

What's the go to market? How how much do you like who do you want to sell to like the hospital network, the individual doctors, even the individual consumer?

Yeah. No, we're actually direct to consumer. Um, so one of the big things that we believe in is going straight to the patient

because innovation in healthcare sort of has always lagged at the hospital systems or the insurance companies. My background is in consumer. I built the largest South Asian dating app prior to this.

Oh, no way.

And uh so we just, you know, we thought what are things that people actually need? Yeah.

America's struggling with healthcare, so we decided to just go direct to consumer.

Yeah. Walk me through some of the I mean the most basic could be you know diet plan, exercise plan all the way to a doctor can refer you to a lab to go get an MRI and surgery and all sorts of stuff like where what do you see as the the early go to market the uh the landing zone like what do you want to be excellent at and then grow from?

Yeah, we're really focused on primary care today.

So when you think about America today 100 million people don't have primary care doctors.

Wow. Um, so that's sort of this huge sort of opportunity to really give people um, you know, basic care. So that means, you know, sometimes you need a prescription, sometimes you need a referral or even a lab ordered if you're going to go see a specialist like a cardiologist and you don't have a lab ready. That often times that visit is a waste of time for the cardiologist and for the patient. Yeah. Right. So we can do a lot of that preliminary primary care virtually. Yeah. And it turns out 80% of all care in general is actually, you know, possible virtually within the primary care setting.

How important is image processing, you know, oh, I got a mole like you look at this like that's like a cl or I I got a scab and it's not healing and I is it infected. Is is AI ready to handle that sort of use case?

Yeah, definitely. So, like, you know, we're seeing um we're already seeing AI being implemented in, you know, obviously the the imaging space and the MRI space. Mhm.

Um but what we're focused more on is really getting the information from the patient, distilling it and summarizing it for a clinician to look at and make the final call.

Sure.

So that's really where Lotus is able to give Americans free primary care essentially because we brought the cost of care down by a factor of 10.

Yeah.

So you can upload images, you can um you know chat with Lotus for hours, it will do the intake similar to how you would answer questions on that clipboard when you go see a doctor. uh and then the doctor can review all that quickly. And the big thing sort of that we did is we um uh sort of created this what we call the personal health record which is the richest longitudinal record on a patient. So when you sign up the first thing we do is we ingest all your health data. So that's from all the EHRs, every doctor you've ever seen, um your wearables data, your insurance claims data. that allows us to build sort of the foundation of the patient and then we can really unlock a lot of the sort of agentic workflows and the clinical workflows on top of that that just make care delivery a lot more accurate at scale.

Years ago I remember this company Zach do was sort of like help you find a doctor nearby almost like a Yelp for doctors. I don't remember what their business model was, but is there any overlap in or learnings from that type of business where maybe there's a referral fee to a specific doctor? Does that make any sense or do you just want the customer to eventually pay or ads like what how do you see monetization evolving? Yeah, Zachdoc did I think something interesting which they they would basically have doctors pay some sort of affiliate fee to be listed on their platform. But um actually getting paid for referrals in healthcare is is a big no no and kind of illegal. That's why doctors,

you know, shouldn't be paid actually for referrals because then you can be incentivized to refer to a particular you know part. And so what we really believe in is in terms of if you think about the largest tech companies in the world, they're consumer companies um and they make money through sponsored content. So we actually think uh if we focus on premium content within fitness and wellness, which is a you know multi-t trillion dollar sort of industry already um that's sort of how we'll be able to monetize. But really what we're focused on today is is bringing the cost of the care down. So, Anthropic's attacking you like you're the w they weren't talking about Open AI. They were talking about you respond. No, no, no. But, but I mean, how you you are going to have to have the talking point that responds to that ad. I'm sure that Super Bowl ad will blow over. Everyone will talk about it in the chat context, but you're going to have to have a strategy for how you, you know, don't do the, "Hey, we're recommending lifts or we're being weird or creepy with your ads." like how do you think about messaging and setting the tone, the mission, the values of the company now so that you never have a PR crisis in the future?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's so important to do that right. You know, trust and safety and privacy is is very foundational to what we're building here at Lotus. And and being, you know, we we want to not only stand for the patient, but also for the doctor,

right? And so when you look at the industry today, doctors are burning out, right? We don't have enough doctors. So, we're really giving them the technology to supercharge their capabilities. And yeah, in terms of, you know, advertising, it'll be optional. And, you know, there'll be a premium subscription. If you don't want to see ads, you can sort of opt out. Yeah. Um, or there's other avenues we're exploring like your employers, uh, right? A lot of large employers that are self-insured, um, struggle to get their employees really good health care or at least primary care. So, the employee has to take time off for work, you know, drive an hour, go see a doctor. half of the times they're not seeing the doctor or seeing a nurse or a PA because we have such a shortage and it ruins their day and and it, you know, reduces productivity for the company. So, we have companies reaching out to us saying, "Hey, like we'll pay you $50 a month. Can you just give this to our employees for free?" You know, so there's a lot of different revenue models we'll explore, but really what we're focused on is, you know, how do we get to a million 10 million patients and grow this company to scale because that's really how we think this sort of primary care crisis can be fixed. Essentially, fee for service doesn't work in primary care,

right? And even value based care doesn't work because we don't have enough doctors.

Yeah. How how are you reacting to the major LLM providers potentially going into this category? A lot of them have already made announcements. They've rolled out features. They have massive user bases. What's going to be the key differentiator that allows you to go the long haul?

Yeah. I know we think that's actually net positive for the for the industry because you know people are starting to trust AI with their health data.

Um the one thing they can't do is they can't actually treat patients, right? Um so we can actually because we have real licensed clinicians.

Sure.

Giving treatment, we can actually close that care loop, right? We can give you that prescription, order the lab, refer you to the specialist, give you a diagnosis.

Um and you know, in fact, you know, one of our investors is an executive at OpenAI. And so we've been sort of following that sort of product that they've been building for a while. But I think it's net positive. I mean I think there's you know there's you know healthcare is a $5 trillion market

um in terms of spend um and a lot of that is just waste right that can be sort of cut out and and tax. you do you think lotus is is really a threat to urgent cares where let's say uh somebody has like a skin issue uh and they're used to the flow of like I want immediate care I want to get uh uh like if somebody gets I don't know like poison bad case of poison oak and they want they need to get some treatment for it they'll go to an urgent care be able to get like a prescription or a steroid or something like that whereas with Lotus you could just get you know basically as long as you have your phone you could immediately like get get treatment. Is is Lotus uh threatening to those kind of businesses that rely on people just needing like convenience?

Yeah. No, actually it's it's the quite opposite because what those urgent care centers today and even emergency rooms at hospitals uh their biggest problem is they're overwhelmed with patients coming in that don't need to come in um for you know things that can be treated through tele medicine or tellahalth right um we actually refer you to urgent care because we we obviously recognize and our clinicians recognize that there are obviously certain things that can't be treated you know virtually and need to be done in person and that's where we refer you to inpatient or urgent care uh sort of you know care where the doctor needs to touch you or you know do a procedural thing but it turns out like I said earlier you know 80 to 90% of care can be done virtually and and that's sort of the big bottleneck. So what ends up happening is all these patients end up going to urgent care or you know hospital ER rooms and then the patients that actually need that care end up not getting it because you know these systems are overwhelmed today.

Well we are in the lambda lightning round. You raised some money. Tell us what happened. What's the deal?

Yeah, we just raised uh you know a total of 41 million in our seed and series.

Congratulations Perkins and CRV code led that round and we're very proud to have these guys.

Well, congratulations on all the progress and I'm sure we'll see you back