Telepatia AI announced that it has raised $42 million in funding, including a $33 million Series A round led by a16z. The round included participation from Shyam Sankar of Palantir, David Vélez of Nubank, and Simón Borrero of Rappi. Existing investors A-Star, Abstract, Canary, Picus, and SV Angel also participated.
Telepatia is building an AI Doctor platform for doctors, designed to help physicians and healthcare teams identify and prevent medical errors before they reach patients.
The company was founded by Nicolas Abad, who said the company’s name was inspired by his father’s nickname. Abad said his father was a doctor who died at age 58 from a preventable cause, and that the launch of ChatGPT shortly after his father’s death led him to believe that an AI Doctor could have helped save his father’s life as a patient and would have been a valuable tool for him as a physician.
Less than a year after moving from Stanford to São Paulo, Telepatia said its AI Doctor is live in more than 25 public and private health institutions across Latin America. The platform is being used in institutions representing more than 100,000 doctors and nurses, including Hospital Mater Dei in Brazil and Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá in Colombia.
Telepatia said its AI Doctor catches and helps prevent one in three medical errors before they reach the patient. The company’s team is made up largely of engineers and doctors, with many members returning to Latin America from cities including San Francisco, Boston, New York, Houston, Toronto, London, Berlin, and Madrid to help build the platform.
The company said its broader mission is to build an AI Doctor and help bring Latin America its first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984.
KEY QUOTES:
“My father’s nickname was Telepatia. He was a doctor who passed away at 58 from a preventable cause. A few days after his death, ChatGPT launched. My first thought was that an AI Doctor would have saved his life as a patient, and that he would have loved using one as a doctor. So we built it: an AI Doctor for doctors, by doctors.”
“Telepatia catches and helps prevent 1 in 3 medical errors before they reach the patient. As Tom, my doctor co-founder, says ‘medical errors are not the fault of any single physician, they’re the fault of a broken system.’”
“We’re building an AI Doctor and our goal is to bring Latin America its first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984.”
Nicolas Abad, Founder and CEO of Telepatia AI
