Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Your AI is integrated into all kinds of EMR systems?

Ram Swaminathan: Yes. We are working with one of Athena’s accounts and we hope to grow that account and potentially work with Athena directly as well. The hope is to keep going up the channel partnership route and integrate ourselves with almost all the EMRs now. 

Sramana Mitra: But is the model still taking a percentage of the collections?

Ram Swaminathan: Yes, on the billing side. On the coding side, it’s a transactional fee model. It depends on what the company is picking up as a contract. Not everybody is going to give up billing. If someone says, “Ram, we would like to automate coding.” That is transactional. It’s a service fee. For every transaction, there is a fee. On the billing side, it’s an end-to-end billing. We can take up the entire billing process and it is a percentage collections model. 

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your business is the transaction fee and what percentage is the collection fee?

Ram Swaminathan: If I were to give a revenue split of coding and billing, we predominantly still do coding automation revenue than billing automation revenue. We started billing automation last year. Coding automation still dominates with 85% of our revenue. 

Sramana Mitra: You have been around for a while right?

Ram Swaminathan: I started the company in 2013, a few years before the ICDT 10, which is the next version of diagnosis codes, was launched. It became a law in America. It has been delayed for several years because the physicians were fighting it hard with the congress because they thought that it was going to be cumbersome.

I saw that as an opportunity to use machine learning technology to read unstructured medical records and map them to standard taxonomy. It has been eight years in the making and I have to say that it has been a fantastic journey. I had learn about the healthcare system. I was a complete outsider prior to the eight years in this company in healthcare. 

Sramana Mitra: Are you a venture-funded company or a bootstrapped company?

Ram Swaminathan: I bootstrapped the company for the longest time. Typically, Silicon Valley likes to raise the capital and then build the company. We are actually doing the opposite. We had a few good angel rounds from a bunch of investors from the North East. 

Sramana Mitra: What is your revenue level?

Ram Swaminathan: Unfortunately, I cannot share it in an open forum. Let’s just say it’s between $10 million and $20 million.

Sramana Mitra: In One Million by One Million, we are a huge advocate of the bootstrapping methodology. We also do Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later as a methodology. It’s a do not go to VCs as beggars, but go as kings type of philosophy. 

Ram Swaminathan: That is amazing. That is exactly what we do. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI
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