“hello, world”
Automate Medical’s First Transmission
The medical software market is broken. Medical professionals are some of the hardest working, intelligent, and most compassionate humans in the world, but they don’t have access to modern software that can help them best do their jobs. In medicine, you still largely have hardware on one side, which spits out lab reports and test results, and on the other side electronic health record systems where labs and tests are stored, largely for accounting purposes. Stuck in the middle are the healthcare professionals. Medicine needs good software to bring these three groups together.
That’s why we’re building software to ensure better health outcomes through the use of diagnostic tests and lab reports. We digitize this data from disparate hardware providers, interpret it, and then create analytics dashboards that health professionals and teams can use to see how both individual patients and groups of patients are doing. Instead of health professionals looking at PDFs, manually interpreting tests, punching numbers into handheld calculators (yes, we couldn’t believe this actually happens either), and issue spotting trends with the naked eye, using our software, doctors team up with data-science and modern software in order to best determine treatment plans and pharmaceutical options.
We give superpowers to medical professionals by transforming messy medical data into useful insights. We take valuable but disorganized data in its rawest form, a bunch of PDFs with numbers and graphs stored across different systems and scattered across institutions, and transform that info using data science and ML into something useful: we call this algorithmic medicine. And if you know any member of our founding team, you know this is exactly the stuff we like to build.
This isn’t our first rodeo. We’re a team from law and finance with a keen eye for detail, a deep comfort with large data sets, and a background in making intuitive tech for busy professionals…and we’re not scared to take on some big challenges if it means we can help make things better for people. Tom and I came from ROSS Intelligence, where we helped rethink search in law, turning hundreds of millions of pages of legal data into the actual answers lawyers needed to best represent their clients. Josh comes from Universe, where he helped rethink event ticketing, turning a painful, multi-step process that hadn’t evolved in decades into something you could do in just a few clicks. And we’ve teamed up with some of the world’s best investors as we launch our moonshot.
Today we are also announcing that we’ve raised a 2M USD pre-seed round including some of the world’s best investors who agree with Tom, Josh, and me that medical software needs to be fixed. Our round is being led by Sam, Jack, and Max Altman’s new fund, Apollo Projects, with participation from other great investors including Tribe Capital led by Arjun Sethi, Village Global led by Erik Torenberg, Ullas Naik, Grivner Capital, BoxOne Ventures and N49P Ventures.
We also have great advisors on board too, including Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology and founder/CEO of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, Carl Mottram, Director of the Mayo Clinic Pulmonary Function Laboratories and Pulmonary Rehabilitation Program, Dr. Meghan Marmor, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine at Stanford University, Dr. Jeremy Road, Chair of the Canadian Thoracic Society Research Committee, Dr. Pearce Wilcox, Medical Director of the largest PFT lab in British Columbia, Dr. Matt Hegewald, Pulmonologist and Assistant Professor at Intermountain Medical Center, and Dr. Nicholas Mark, previously Medical Director at KenSci and pulmonary and critical care physician at Swedish.
At Automate Medical we envision a world where software and data science play an essential role in the diagnosis and treatment of all diseases in the future. Our software will ensure patients receive not only the best treatment possible but personalized pharmaceutical and treatment plans benchmarked using data, rather than depending on the individual experience of a particular physician or group. We’re excited and humbled to be building in a space and joining other amazing startups who are already helping shape the future of medical software and HealthTech in so many ways.
You’ll notice that you’re reading about this on Medium, instead of in a TechCrunch or BetaKit article. We love both those publications dearly along with a whole slew of others, but we find that sometimes in the excitement of a funding press release the most important detail, what the company is going to do, gets overshadowed. Raising a pre-seed round is not product-market fit; raising money is just part of a startup’s journey, not its destination. That’s why we put this post in our own words so we can focus on the important part which is talking to users, building software people want, and chasing our moonshot: a world where our software helps ensure everyone gets access to high-quality, affordable medical service. Wish us luck!
“hello, world” from Tom, Josh, and Andrew.
