HealthLeap raises $38M from Sequoia to bring real-time AI disease screening to hospitals, starting with malnutrition

Speaker 1: Have a good rest Thanks, of your guys. Goodbye.

Speaker 3: Cheers,

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Speaker 10: Let's give

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Speaker 1: And let's give

Speaker 3: it up. Next guest.

Speaker 1: A surprise guest.

Speaker 3: What's going on?

Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Speaker 7: Hey. Hey. Good. And you, Tony?

Speaker 3: We're doing great. Sorry for the chaos today.

Speaker 1: We're a little bit behind schedule. But thank you for being flexible. Thank you for sticking it out and hopping on TBPN. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company to kick it off?

Speaker 7: Yes. No. I'm I'm Josiah, I'm the CEO cofounder of HealthLib. Yeah. Our our mission is just to improve the health outcomes of as many people as possible.

Speaker 1: Sure. And you raised some money. How much did you raise?

Speaker 7: Today, we're announcing 38,000,000 backed by Sequoia.

Speaker 3: Sequoia, no introduction needed. There we go. Can we get the replay pulled up? That'd be great.

Speaker 1: This is key.

Speaker 3: Boom. Great. Lots of Gong. With authority, John. Spend more time. Coming in hot. Bam. Here

Speaker 1: we go.

Speaker 3: Alright. We can take that down.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 3: Okay. Improving health outcomes for everyone, where do you start?

Speaker 7: That's the question. So, yeah, a little bit about a quick backstory. I started my first business ventures back in South Africa as a teenager who couldn't afford health care myself. And as a 13 year old, initial... The initial spark was I was selected to represent South Africa at the international mass competition, but I couldn't afford my flight ticket. So I started a little business ventures, taught myself chess, used this data startup capital from winning tournaments That's crazy.

Speaker 3: And then

Speaker 7: made enough money to buy a computer, could do more interesting stuff, and I used the... Some of the profits to pay for my own health care, change my own life, but but I wanted to I was left with this kind of meaning driven search what's the most important thing I can dedicate my career to. Yeah. That's why I teamed up with my sister who is a clinician. Amazing. She actually specialized in clinical nutrition, so we teamed up to start there and identify undiagnosed disease related malnutrition as the first condition we went after and we've now expanded.

Speaker 1: The basic workflow is partner with a hospital, partner with a hospital network, deploy your solution, scan medical records from patients that come in, detect problems before they become a major issue, things that might have been overlooked by a nurse, by a doctor. And then you are helping solve those problems or at least flag them so that a doctor can solve them. But also reducing their financial liability because they might have medical malpractice if they're I if come in and I'm having a heart attack and they didn't pick it up, that's a problem and you help them avoid that situation. Is that roughly correct?

Speaker 7: Yes. So, exactly. There's so many patients who come into a hospital but they have other conditions as well that might not be detected or even if they are detected, get detected late. So having this high precision real time risk screening for every patient every day across all major health conditions allows patients to get better care, clinicians to allocate their time more effectively, and hospitals also get paid for the the actual appropriate severity in their population. But overall, the cost of health care actually goes down because people stay healthier.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. How do you sell the hospitals these days? I mean, you're a smaller company backed by Sequoia, so I'm sure there's connections. But what what is the sales process like?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Fantastic question. So historically, companies in healthcare tended to move quite slow, these extremely long sales cycles. Our approach was really, let's upfront quantify the opportunity for health systems so we kind of simulate backtest what would happen if they deploy us, and then we also contractually go go at risk. So they...

Speaker 1: Have to already have a relationship with a hospital. It's not like you can you can say, okay. There's this hospital. Let me go generate a report and then send them my...

Speaker 5: Well, I

Speaker 3: think it's more like before before asking for a bunch of money Yeah. Prove that it's gonna

Speaker 1: look like you already have a conversation going. That makes a lot of sense. Cool.

Speaker 7: Yes. And at this point, it's kind of word-of-mouth. Like, we go to events. Hospitals are are actually quite collaborative because they like to share, they geographically separate this, so they're kind of in that sense noncompetitive. So at at conferences, like, two weeks ago, pain medicine went on stage at one of the largest healthcare conferences and just talked about how much their patient health improved by deploying HealthLeap and then we got a bunch of interest from that.

Speaker 1: That's very cool.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's so funny. There's so many other industries where one business will develop an advantage through a new technology and AI product and they're like, let's not tell anyone and let's like get us the maximum amount of value out of this Yeah. Whereas like hospitals Yeah.

Speaker 2: You know,

Speaker 3: they're not worried about you're Yeah. Much more positive sum.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. It's a super positive sum future. I could imagine in the future like you go, you you you break your arm or you're having a heart attack, you go into hospital and it's automatically flagged that you need something done with your upper maxilla or like a double jaw surgery or maybe some leg lengthening.

Speaker 3: John's... So he

Speaker 1: has some licks back.

Speaker 3: John's having too much.

Speaker 1: Obviously, are really really positive was your... As

Speaker 3: a math Olympiad, what was your reaction to yesterday? Yeah.

Speaker 7: Well, tell me more.

Speaker 3: Oh, he's so locked he's so he's so locked in. I love it. Some math some math problems got solved. That's all you that's how you really that's all you really need to know. The

Speaker 1: headline is OpenAI drops a bomb on maths and and the the actual like headline from OpenAI is that they... I I mean, really is like hundreds of math problems have been solved. This is obviously a couple weeks after the Navier Stokes solution and the Hodge conjecture fell earlier. So, yeah, you are right that it's like every week. I guess the bigger question is, like, more broadly, as someone who has played in that space, what has been your reaction to model progress in math?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah. I I think it's it's fascinating. It's fascinating to see. I think, in in some ways, you know, this this was kind of predicted Yeah. That... And and so I think I... I'm almost still waiting for for AI to get to the point where it can come up with fundamentally new spaces to go and explore. So it's like more efficient search space.

Speaker 1: It's like move the goalpost. I like Yeah. I see the goalposts moving.

Speaker 7: But, yeah. But but, no, I I I personally expected this and, it's funny. I remember remember the reason I I stopped playing chess was I I took it seriously for one year, got better, and then I was like, why am I doing this? The computer is doing it so much better. Let's... It's it's it's exciting to go and find the new problems that humans can now uniquely solve. And Yeah. I I I find it energizing.

Speaker 1: I think it's quite And there's and and there's still, yeah, so much to be done in diffusion and and and this is I think what HealthLeap is. It's a diffusion company in as much as it is an AI company. Right? It's like you need to actually bring the solution to the market integrated in a way that gets a real impactful result that people can actually benefit from. Thank you so much for coming on the show.