AI Investor Forum: Gus Tai on AI in Healthcare (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, Gus, could you also discuss Joanna Strober’s company that you have invested in and have been tracking for a while? I think it’s a good case study to discuss in this context.

Gus Tai: Absolutely. The company is called Midi Health, and I was a seed investor with Midi. That company is a good illustration of how entrepreneurs, regardless of how they want to think about raising money, can approach industries. There was a latent need and a discontinuity in being able to serve that latent need.

Midi Health is a leading company in treating the life stage of menopause for women. They treat symptoms and discomforts that come with menopause. They could also be changes in body chemistry that could be augmented in terms of care. From my perspective, menopause had not been an overly served market of generalists and experts for treating it. The population above a certain age has these symptoms that they just accept, like hot flashes and other diseases.

With the change of COVID and telemedicine, it allowed the aggregation of taking an expert at menopause and being able to serve a larger geographical area. You could add other analyses of past studies of what drugs are helpful for mitigating certain circumstances.

From my point of view, as Midi is an emerging leader here with volume, they can, with the right type of privacy and compliance, analyze these cases to say, ‘Oh, it appears that these are the types of treatments that might be better for the customers.’

I don’t have information on what they’re doing, and I’m not saying that they’re doing that, but these are the opportunities. If you are a first mover because of changes in regulation infrastructure, you can get more data, analyze and mine the data, and provide better service.

Sramana Mitra: So this is a subscription-based business model, right?

Gus Tai: I love Midi. It is oriented toward having real touch points of healthcare. You have access to physicians and nurses. It’s a telemedicine care provider along with other things that a care provider provides. They have very high net promoter scores.

Sramana Mitra: It’s basically an insurance-covered regular, healthcare business model.

Gus Tai: Yes. It’s designed quite well and builds upon the successes and failures of people who were the first movers in this category. It’s an alternative to the traditional healthcare system. Most people don’t like the traditional healthcare system in America, for better or for worse.

Sramana Mitra: So, basically the business model is a telehealth clinic.

Gus Tai: Yes, that’s correct, Sramana. It has the focus and the customer adoption of a telehealth clinic but is focused on a horizontal need. We can better serve consumers that have been under serviced, because we can get experts that have greater geographic reach. Then as we have a larger audience, we will be able to, I suspect, analyze that to increase the precision of care protocols. So that’s a type of machine learning or AI there that entrepreneurs could apply.

Sramana Mitra: So this model could work in a lot of different niches.

Gus Tai: Absolutely.

This segment is part 5 in the series : AI Investor Forum: Gus Tai on AI in Healthcare
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