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AI, Unicorn Founder hm AI, Unicorn Founder hm

Why Healthcare Needs Its Own Foundation Models | Ortet Founder & CEO Kyunghyun Cho

One of the world’s leading AI researchers has big plans for healthcare. And Thoreau just committed $500 million to bring that vision to life.

This week, we are the first to sit down with Ortet founder and CEO Kyunghyun Cho to talk about the frontier AI lab for health. After helping shape some of the technologies behind modern AI and selling his last AI startup to Genentech, Kyunghyun is now taking on a much bigger challenge: building a foundation model that can learn across biological, clinical, and operational data to deliver predictably better care.

We cover:

  • Why healthcare needs its own foundation models, and the “cold start” problem he thinks it can solve

  • What Ortet plans to do differently from general-purpose AI companies

  • Why Ortet secured $500 million before it had even really gotten started

  • What buying AI compute and a lobster roll have in common

  • How KC’s own experience with cancer shaped his vision for more predictable healthcare

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AI, Clinician Innovators hm AI, Clinician Innovators hm

Can AI Finish What The Quality Revolution Started? | Bunkerhill Health CCO Dr. Azita Hamedani

For decades, healthcare's quality movement gave us checklists, forcing functions, and protocols to catch human error before it reached a patient. It worked, to a point. But as medical knowledge and patient complexity keep outpacing what any human system can track, a new question is emerging: can AI pick up where that movement left off?

In this episode, in her first interview since stepping into the role, we talk with Dr. Azita Hamedani, the newly appointed Chief Clinical Officer at Bunkerhill Health, an AI company backed by Sequoia and Khosla Ventures. After nearly her entire career in academic medicine, Azita made the leap to a startup chasing a promise she's been thinking about since medical school.

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AI, Industry Giant, Clinician Innovators hm AI, Industry Giant, Clinician Innovators hm

Anthropic’s Bet on the Future of Healthcare | Sarah Russell, MD

Sarah Russell picked up a phrase at her new job at Anthropic: a "non-regrettable primitive." It's how she describes the kind of infrastructure she thinks Anthropic should be building in healthcare, and it says a lot about how one of the most closely watched companies in health AI is positioning itself. 

In this episode, Steve talks with Sarah Russell, healthcare and life sciences lead at Anthropic. This conversation comes as Anthropic heads toward what's shaping up to be one of the most anticipated IPOs in years.

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AI, Clinician Innovators, Unicorn Founder hm AI, Clinician Innovators, Unicorn Founder hm

From Early Struggle to Billion+ Exit | SmarterDx Founders Michael Gao & Joshua Geleris

We don't talk enough about how hard it actually is to build a healthcare startup. Behind SmarterDx's story, now one of the biggest health AI exits to date, were 18 months without a single customer, a pivot that seemed to make no product sense, and two co-founders who went back to working as hospitalists just to get by.

In this episode, Steve gets the real story from Dr. Michael Gao and Dr. Joshua Geleris about the challenges they faced and what ultimately unlocked real growth and led to their billion+ acquisition by New Mountain Capital.

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Digital Health, AI, Healthcare VC hm Digital Health, AI, Healthcare VC hm

AI and Hard Tech in Healthcare | YC Partners Jared Friedman and Ankit Gupta

Startup accelerator and venture capital firm Y Combinator has a long history of backing early-stage healthcare startups, with a particular focus on technical founders tackling difficult problems. In this episode, YC partners Jared Friedman and Ankit Gupta share their insights on healthcare investing, the potential of AI in our industry, and why they believe young, tactical founders can play a role in reshaping healthcare.

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