Building a Capital Efficient Healthcare AI Venture to $20M: Deepak Gaddipati, Founder and CTO of VirtuSense (Part 1)

Deepak has built a capital-efficient fall-detection company from Peoria, Illinois with a backend engineering team in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

It’s an impressive entrepreneurial journey with a mission-driven company that is making real impact in the lives of seniors with fall risk.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Deepak Gaddipati: I’m from India. I grew up in India for most of my life. My dad was a government official. Every two years, we got kicked around to various parts of the state. I ended up doing my schooling in six cities. I was passionate about engineering. I’m an electrical engineer by trade. I did my Masters in Electrical Engineering in the States. That was in 2002.

Sramana Mitra: Where in the US?

Deepak Gaddipati: Illinois. I did my Masters in a private school called Bradley. When you come to the States, the first city always leaves a pretty good impression on you. I had a really good experience going to Bradley where I did a lot of research in computer vision. Back then, it was neural networks and all that.

Sramana Mitra: What happened after your Masters?

Deepak Gaddipati: I did a lot of computer vision [projects]. I was decently popular because of some of the research work I did. I got a bunch of job offers. An interesting one was a company in LA. They were doing airport security scanners back then. I loved the place. I ended up moving to LA to work for a company called Rapiscan Technologies. I started in their R&D group. Given my research experience, I was directly reporting to the VP of R&D. We were working on some special projects.

Sramana Mitra: For how long did that go on?

Deepak Gaddipati: That went on for almost three years. I got the chance to develop technologies that look for explosives on people. We developed the first generation human scanners looking for explosives on humans and put them in all airports across the world. That gave a good headstart in my career – launching a product and seeing the real impact.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after that?

Deepak Gaddipati: I ended up working with DoD. There was interest from DoD to develop some technology that involved tracking and movement detection.

Sramana Mitra: To do that, you moved to Washington?

Deepak Gaddipati: No. After LA, I moved to New York. I helped a company. They were detecting melanomas. I did that for about a year and a half. The guys from DoD contacted me to do some research for them. They wanted to route it to some university. I said why not Bradley. We got a few millions of dollars in funding to do research for the US Army. I did quite a bit of work for Army and a little bit for the Navy.

While I was doing that, my grandmother who was 68 years old fell, broke her hip, and died as a result. That’s what got an inkling in my head. How come we didn’t know that she was a fall risk? A lot of my family were physicians. She had never fallen before.

I came back to the States and a lot of my neighbors were physicians. I sat with them and I did a bunch of interviews. I was trying to understand how to prevent falls. It was eye-opening. At the same time, I had teams. We did a bunch of research to see what is really done in the field today. This is a $50 billion a year problem. Every year, the cost goes up. We don’t do anything to figure out who’s at risk.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Capital Efficient Healthcare AI Venture to $20M: Deepak Gaddipati, Founder and CTO of VirtuSense
1 2 3 4 5