Building A Healthcare Unicorn In Three Years | Assort Health Founders Jeff Liu and Jon Wang
They built a $1.2 billion healthcare AI company in under three years, but they say the hardest part of healthcare AI isn't the AI.
This week, Halle sits down with Assort Health co-founders and co-CEOs Jeffery Liu and Jon Wang, whose company reached a $1.2 billion valuation in under three years. They discuss why building great healthcare AI takes far more than good models, how they scaled from 15 employees to nearly 250 in a year, and what they've learned from more than 190 million patient interactions. They also share why voice AI is harder than it looks, how they're thinking about building durable moats in the age of foundation models, and why helping patients navigate the healthcare system may be one of AI's biggest opportunities.
We cover:
The AI role suddenly showing up at every healthcare startup
The surprising demographic that gives AI voice agents the highest satisfaction scores
How healthcare AI is shifting from single-purpose tools to platforms that remember patients across every interaction
Why the biggest moat in healthcare AI may not be the model itself
The biggest misconception investors have about moats in healthcare AI
How to triple your team without losing the culture that made the company successful
—
Our guests:
Jon Wang
Jon Wang is co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, the precision-guided patient access platform built to navigate the complexity of specialty-specific care. Jon has focused his career on building technologies that reduce administrative burden, improving the patient experience, and helping specialty practices scale more effectively. Inspired by growing up with a physician father and statistician mother, Jon developed an early interest in using technology and data to improve healthcare. While an MD candidate at the University of California, San Francisco, he saw firsthand the challenges patients face navigating care, motivating him to build technology that helps healthcare organizations deliver a more connected, accessible patient experience with Assort Health. Prior to founding Assort Health, Jon earned a degree in bioinformatics from Stanford University and was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
Jeffery Liu
Jeffery Liu is the co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, the precision-guided patient access
platform built to navigate the complexity of specialty-specific care. Under his leadership, Assort is building an end-to-end AI agents platform trained to orchestrate the hardest parts of patient access, from scheduling, intake, referrals, care gap closure, medication refills, lab requests, payments, and closing care gaps across the entire patient journey. Prior to founding Assort Health, Jeff was the Head of Product Engineering at Athelas, a healthcare technology company valued at $6B and backed by Sequoia, Y Combinator, and General Catalyst. He played a pivotal role in the early engineering team at Cameo, scaling the platform to unicorn status, and honed his technical skills as a Senior Software Engineer at Meta. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Economics from Duke University.
—
Tune in