AI holds great promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side; many startups are convinced that machine learning-based systems can do very well in adjacent tasks such as meeting scheduling and confirmations.
Brazilian startup Carecode is among these AI believers. It’s coming out of hiding with an ambition to reduce health care costs and improve medical outcomes by developing AI agents that focus on tasks that happen before and after a medical encounter — and would typically be run by a call center.
“We tend to think that only the moment with the doctor is important, but after spending 10 years in healthcare, I realized that those moments (around the appointment) are just as important as the medical appointment,” CEO Thomaz Srougi (photo right image above) told TechCrunch.
Srougi comes from a family of doctors, but he himself is not one; His first-hand knowledge of healthcare comes from founding Dr. Consulta, a private medical services provider that has raised about $168 million in funding and where he remains chairman.
Carecode is still early in its fundraising journey, but already has an impressive cap table: its $4.3 million pre-round was primarily funded by a16z and QED, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst, K50 Ventures and Latitud Ventures, as well as high prices. profile figures from Brazil’s tech scene, including Nubank founder David Vélez.
Venture capital in Latin America is still going through a “startup winter,” but — as this preliminary surge underscores — there’s still funding for entrepreneurs with data like Srougi and his co-founder, Pedro Magalhães, a former CTO at several startups in others, including BEES Bank Brasil and Zé Delivery.
“I think that’s very true for mainstream VCs, especially when the world is upside down,” suggested Srougi, also noting that a16z partner Gabriel Vasquez helped mature the idea for Carecode and move the startup from planning to execution phase.
Srougi is also drawing on the relationships he has built over his career to find partners who can test Carecode. Early results with a partner it can’t name look promising, according to the startup, which said the results suggest its AI agents can do much of the work of a typical healthcare call center for a fraction of the cost, and even go a step further by proactively filling canceled slots while letting employees take care of more complex cases.
Importantly for Brazil, Carecode meets users where they are, which is usually on WhatsApp – where it supports text and audio messaging. “This is really important because elderly individuals and most low-income individuals prefer to send WhatsApp audio instead of typing,” Srougi said, adding that voice calls are also on the roadmap.
These localization changes are one aspect that makes Carecode different from American benchmarks like Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by Bret Taylor.
Another difference is Carecode’s vertical focus. According to QED partner and head of Brazil, Camila Vieira Fernandes, this gives the startup an advantage over horizontal approaches which “often require multiple solutions to achieve sub-par results, negatively impacting the customer experience and leaving value considerable unused”.
Market size can be a limitation for a vertical model, but healthcare in Brazil isn’t exactly a small country, and neither is the problem Carecode is pursuing. According to Srougi, healthcare companies in Brazil spend 50% of their revenue on contact centers and administrative payroll—about $100 billion a year.
Srougi and his team believe that going vertical into a market with specific needs like healthcare will help Carecode build a gap against more general competitors, but the startup could also diversify later. “We may be able to go into insurance in the future, for example life insurance and other sectors related to healthcare. We want to use payments. We can use financing. So it all comes down to health care,” he added.
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