Baba raises $40M Series A to scale its human-led healthcare coordination platform for Medicare patients

Speaker 1: Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have our next guest. Next. Connor Sweeney from BABA, the founder and CEO. There he is. How you doing, Connor? What was Thank the you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on. First... Second time on the show. I forgot. That's right. Yeah. You were up... You were on back in February. Well, welcome back. Why don't you reintroduce the company? Give us the news. Jordy's itching to hit this gong. So I I know that there's gonna be a big number, but break it all down for us, please. For sure. No. I really appreciate it. So we're announcing Boba's $40,000,000 series a. Let's go. We're back here in February for a seat, so we've been

Speaker 6: moving quickly.

Speaker 1: Where are going, Jordy? And we need that $40,000,000. First Mark Capital. Let's pull up replay. CVS Health Ventures coming in. General Catalyst, Genius Ventures. We know those guys. Let's see how Jordy did on this. Oh, that's a good hit. A good hit. It it didn't have as much fervor and a much... It wasn't an angry hit, but deliver. Not not a ton of emotion. It's clean. But but just calculated. Focus intensity that you expect Yeah. Out

Speaker 2: like Connor and the Boba team. Anyway. Next time I gotta come do it in person. Please. Please. Love to have you. Reintroduce the business, what guys are doing, how it's evolved since last time. I know the growth is insane, yeah.

Speaker 6: I appreciate it. No, so we're a health platform. So we connect older adults and their families, usually folks with Medicare, with other humans, which I know is like rare pitch these days. But we went out and we found hundreds of experts who are nurses and social workers across the country, and then we can connect them with these families that need help coordinating care, which sounds pretty simple until you're in the middle of it, but it's benefits enrollments, getting the right appointments, getting the right transportation to those appointments. And so in the process, we've been able to use a lot of AI but still keep this a very human service, which really matters to the families. You have a 100 Oh,

Speaker 2: sorry. You're giving AI to one side of the marketplace to be able to work with patients more effectively, have less busy work for them. Is that where this is going?

Speaker 6: For sure. So we we call them advocates, and at the end of the day, we we really wanted to see where all the open and closed source models fail on these, like... We call them care coordination tasks. Right? So, like, one example. You have someone who is on federal benefits. Yeah. And they need to... Or maybe they're on Medicaid, they they they need help getting their food stamps, right? Yeah. That can be a really challenging process because you have to verify how much income you make and if you have a job and all these other steps. And then you also need to consolidate all your medicines because you have to go to the pharmacy every few days, and if you can't drive, that really makes it hard. So we have one of our advocates come in and like do all that work, and we measure where AI can do that, you know, can news go and do all these steps properly. And what we found, we actually just published this, we call it like BabaBench, was that AI is obviously really good at a lot of it, but it keeps making mistakes. It'll share too much information and in healthcare, that's really problematic. Right? You can move your insurance if you overshare. Is Baba Bench just bait for the labs to hill climb Baba Bench and make your life really easy? You're just like, cool. I can raise 40,000,000,

Speaker 1: not get crazy diluted, and the labs will do all the hard stuff. Is is there a thesis where Baba Bench you wanted to saturate that that would benefit you? Well, I'm not... I I wouldn't assume it's a public benchmark. Is it? No. It is. It's on our website. Oh,.com/bench. Yeah. Actually, yes. But but but I I I... I'm somewhat joking, but I'm also asking, like, a serious strategy question, which is, like, you benefit if the leading labs get good at a certain thing. Obviously, you don't want them to like, you know, completely steamroll you with a product competitor. But if the models get better and then the open source models get better, that drives down your cost. Is there actually a strategy there or is this... Or is that just like a knock on effect?

Speaker 6: No. It's definitely... I wouldn't say it's deliberate strategy. It wouldn't hurt. Yeah. We have really deep relationships. Even some of our customers became investors in this. Yeah. Yeah. Right? So some of these are like... Most people watching this probably don't recognize all these funds, but Sure. A lot of these are like very deeply respected like healthcare funds or Sure. They even like have health insurance companies. Yeah. Yeah. Right? And so

Speaker 1: those relationships are only gonna deepen whether that's a human led service or if we get really good at that, like, long horizon stuff. So Yeah. Yeah. No. It seems like the... I mean, the value of the business is is, you know, obviously, the AI is very important, but, there's so much more to it. You have 10,000 patients that you've helped. Have 100,000 on the wait list. That feels extremely bullish but also like kind of a problem. What's the plan to actually service all the demand? I mean, obviously, you're raising more capital, but what is the bottleneck? Because typically with software, you just replicate it infinitely, but there are costs to these things. It feels like you want to ideally

Speaker 6: pay down that waitlist and get those families off there so they can get healthcare as soon as possible, right? So what's really cool is our service is covered by insurance. So that wait list exists because we are working through the process of convincing more plans. When I say plans like Cigna for example or Humana in Texas or Maine or whatever that this is valuable. And so we're starting to see that from some of the plans we we were able to convince pretty early, and now they're like vastly blowing it up. Right? And we don't have to have that waiting list dynamic. But because this is still like human to human, which does matter for a lot of these families, Right? We're still a little limited on that front. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. How have you grown how have you grown the core team since your last time on the show? Yeah. Well, we've doubled the team. We're still about half engineers, so we're, you know, a little under 20 people in general. Could not be more excited by by the end talent density. We're all in Soho, New York, which is a... I think an advantage for us. This is where a lot of healthcare lives... Breathes. And so if you're looking to to do real applied AI and and outside of the SF bubble, we're hiring. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's actually, yeah, measurable. I'm sure a lot of the a lot of the clients and patients, like, feel a very visceral, like,

Speaker 2: reward from using the using the service. That's great. Awesome. Well, progress. Thank you so much. Looking forward to the B. Yep. I'm sure you'll be back soon. Any day now. Hopefully. Thanks, Good luck to you, Connor. Cheers. Well... Alright. We'll head back to the timeline. Take me through it, Jordy. What what what did we miss? Big news. What's that? In Louisiana at the Alexandria Airport, they already have a Christmas tree up. And no surprises. Sure. At least a handful of people over at the airport watching the show Probably. Tracking the countdown. I understand. Sixty five days. We're only sixty five days out. It's a blink of an eye. There's no Christmas tree. Yeah. But but, yeah, I expect to see a fast takeoff now just in people traveling through the Louisiana airport. Oh, you think it's sealing through the airport. Probably local economy. Complaining when they get to their home airport or wherever they're going and For saying there's no tree. Yeah. 65. What are you guys doing? How can I trust that? How can I trust how can I trust you to help me get from point a to point b? Yeah.

Speaker 1: You think we're gonna go to You don't York even have the basics. We should do a connection through Louisiana so we can get off and enjoy the tree. You wanna play with a connection? I mean, amazing... Worth it. It's worth it. Save a little bit of money. Like, everyone hates a layover, but getting to see this Christmas tree in person offsets that by a factor of like 10 or a thousand, you know. It's huge huge benefit. So if you're traveling cross country, make sure you stop in Louisiana. The air... At the Alexandria Airport already has a Christmas tree. Enjoy it. Anything else we should cover before we wrap up for the day, Jordy? There are a couple other news items. Clem over at Hugging Face gave a, I think, a one star review to the Insta doc from Netflix about AI gone wild. He said, Just watched the Netflix Instadoc about the OpenAI cyberattack on Hugging Face. Super disappointing as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology in full doomer mode. I spent more than two hours with them trying to correct all their mistakes and ground this in reality, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens. But it looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong. So go watch the doc. Figure it out for yourself. What was funny is that someone quote tweeted him and and was, like, kind of dunking, and then he reposted it. So I think he's just, you know, just happy to get the conversation going, I guess. There's this other meme that's happening where a 15 year old schoolboy from China found instructions on how to launch 300 clogged code agents so that while he's at school, they would trade and connected them to a verification layer. And people are throwing up these, like, insane visualizations, and they all start with the line, it's becoming effing dangerous. And, it's this odd, like, astroturf. It's unclear if they're doing it for the for the creator payout at this point. I thought the creator payout was so nerfed that it wasn't wasn't worth it. We have some potential updates to the rest of the show, but I think we will be wrapping. Jordy, why don't you

Speaker 2: why don't you coordinate with the production team on what happens next? But I think we gotta talk through. About Yeah. This Beverly Hills condo project Okay. On borrowing money from its future residents. So we... It it looks like we might be having a surprise guest We might.