In this episode of The Next Next, Jason Jacobs interviews Sunita Mohanty, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Practice, a healthcare startup integrating AI into its electronic health records (EHR) and practice management platform. Sunita shares her journey from being a product leader at Meta to founding Vibrant Practice after encountering the limitations of traditional allopathic medicine while dealing with her own autoimmune condition. The discussion delves into how Vibrant Practice aims to improve patient care through AI by assisting small, independent practices. The conversation also covers Vibrant Practice's business model, technological stack, and the future of AI in healthcare, emphasizing the balance between human touch and AI efficiency.
Leveraging AI for Personalized Medicine with Sunita Mohanty of Vibrant Practice In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs interviews Sunita Mohanty, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Practice, a healthcare startup focusing on personalized medicine. Sunita shares her journey from being a product leader at Meta to founding Vibrant Practice after facing health challenges that led her to functional medicine. The discussion covers the integration of AI into Vibrant Practice's EHR and practice management platform, addressing issues like doctor burnout and operational inefficiencies. Sunita also discusses the mindset shift required in the healthcare industry, the balance of using AI and human touch in care, and the company's journey from building manually to leveraging AI-driven automation. The conversation touches on the company's SaaS business model, the importance of providing better patient care, and future scaling plans while maintaining a lean, technology-based team.
00:00 Introduction to Today's Episode
00:01 Meet Sunita Mohanty: From Meta to Vibrant Practice
00:45 The Birth of Vibrant Practice
01:24 The Role of AI in Healthcare
01:48 Welcome to The Next Next
03:42 Sunita's Journey to Functional Medicine
06:47 Challenges and Opportunities in Personalized Medicine
08:45 Building Vibrant Practice: The Early Days
12:14 The Shift Towards Functional and Integrative Medicine
17:26 The Future of Healthcare: Technology and Mindset Shifts
20:40 Navigating the Healthcare System: Insurance and Cash-Based Models
24:10 Vibrant Practice: The All-in-One Platform
28:07 Integrating Point Solutions for Clinicians
29:32 AI in Clinical Operations
32:35 Business Model and Market Strategy
34:44 Balancing AI and Human Touch
43:06 Scaling the Team with AI
46:10 Future of AI in Startups and Venture Capital
51:17 Opportunities in Underserved Markets
55:09 Closing Thoughts and Call to Action
Jason Jacobs: On today's episode of the Next. Next, our guest is Sunita Mohanty, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Practice. Vibrant Practice is a healthcare startup focused on personalized medicine that integrates AI into its EHR and practice management platform. Sunita shares her personal journey from being a product leader at Meta to founding Vibrant after experiencing the limitations of traditional allopathic medicine firsthand.
I enjoyed this one because it was fascinating to hear. Sunita's journey. First experiencing some medical issues that led her down the path of functional medicine. And at the same time a product lead on an AI product at Meta and those worlds ultimately collided where Sunita went down the rabbit hole of functional medicine.
I. Saw the trends of more independent practices starting up and more doctors getting burned out and needing to find a better way to deliver patient care and seeing all the issues with the back office and with personalization and with scheduling, and with all the things that power making these practices run smoothly with a small team and a small budget.
So enter vibrant practice, and it's fascinating hearing about how Vibrant Practice has been incorporating AI into their offerings, but also how they've been using AI internally to build different sunita's. Got firsthand experience in terms of where all this is going, and if you're a skeptic on whether AI can bring efficiency, both for end customers and for you.
As the builder, you might wanna listen to this one because Sunita is a living and breathing example of how AI can provide a lot of leverage all around. At any rate, let's get into it. But before we get started,
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is The Next Next. It's not really a show, it's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built, and selfishly the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself.
While bringing all of you along for the ride, not sure where this is gonna go, but it's gonna be fun.
Okay. Sunita Mohanty, welcome to the show.
Sunita Mohanty: Thanks, Jason. Great to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. I'm excited to have you , you were one of the people I actually came across just, I forget exactly what you posted, but you posted something thoughtful on LinkedIn about ai and then I looked into your company and your background and you seemed super interesting and the company seemed super interesting.
So I reached out cold and you were kind enough to to take the message and we had a great chat and and you agreed to come on the show and here we are. So thank you for all of that. I.
Sunita Mohanty: Love it. LinkedIn is such an amazing channel these days. I think that to me is one of the most awesome pieces, but it's great to connect love the folks you've been bringing on and excited to be a part of this crew.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. And we, I feel like LinkedIn is that by process of elimination because we need a, something, a vessel to engage on the topics that we care about and are trying to get smarter on. And Twitter is not that anymore.
Sunita Mohanty: No, it's so true. It's so true. So there's been a huge moment for LinkedIn to fill that space of all the thought pieces and, all the all the connecting on, whether it's topics of work or just interesting areas of life. It's fascinating to see all that dialogue now happening on LinkedIn.
Good for them.
Jason Jacobs: Kicking things off, maybe just start with with a quick overview on Vibrant, what is it and how did it come about?
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah, so I'm the CEO and co-founder of Vibrant Practice. We are an all-in-one platform for personalized medicine, and so we're practice management EHR, with a layer of AI on top of it. So that we're we've built a vertical SaaS model for this space. And it's specifically starting with doctors who practice functional, integrative, or longevity medicine, this area of personalized medicine.
It is an exciting and growing area. In the field of care that I'm personally very passionate about. My own experience as a patient actually brought me to this, and I can go into that. My, my background I actually am not a doctor. Don't have a clinical background.
I come from a family of doctors. But I was a product leader. Most recently at Meta I was leading an AI product team building the AI experiences for the Meta Ray band. So bringing together computer vision and LLMs to put it on the glasses form factor. And and that was, super exciting to be able to be designing.
For the future in that role and seeing like where things are going, everything's gonna be really personalized and contextually driven. And so that was happening in my day job, but in my personal life, I had autoimmune disease diagnosis come up. It was about a year after having my first kid also potentially triggered by Covid.
Who knows? There's a mix of things going on. But I had this autoimmune disease diagnosis and the doctors I was working with were telling me my only option was surgery. My allopathic kind of. Doctors and and I went on the internet and I thought, I, there's gotta be a different way.
I've seen my mom actually go through similar things. She had a lot of side effects later on in her life. And I just thought, let me see what the internet has to say. And I found that a lot of people were getting back to remission with the condition I had with the help of functional medicine or, just taking it more of a dive on lifestyle and and just finer grained kind of tweaks to avoid surgery.
And so I said, let me go find a doctor who will work with me in this way. And I was blown away by just the whole process because this doctor took time to do more tests and understand and develop a broader picture of what was happening in my body and. And that allowed us to create this really personalized plan.
And in a way where my allopathic doctors, like they were just saying, okay, she has a problem with her thyroid. We've seen this, we have to remove it. Like this other path was, hey, like what's causing inflammation in your body such that your thyroid is reacting in this way? Okay let's target those root causes of what's impacting your body?
And then let's figure out, how we can get you back on track. And so anyways, short, slow, long story short is I was back to remission with my health within eight months of, with the help of this doctor and avoided surgery. And for me, the light bulb just went off in, in, in seeing this approach that is more data driven, more personalized and effective ultimately.
And the fact that. This isn't what kind of mainstream medicine is doing. To me it felt like there's a really big gap to get there because of technology and because this kind of personalization that AI promises has not yet trickled in. And so I just saw this great opportunity to bring these two parts of my life together and jump in and try to build something.
So I got obsessed. I left Meta in 2023 and started following some doctors around to try to figure out like what I could build for them that could be useful. And and I started hearing a really similar refrain from a lot of my. Friends who were primary care doctors or primary care Jason.
They were all, really burnt out. They were feeling like they were disillusioned by the way that they had to practice and, appointment mill type environments driven by insurance. And and a lot of 'em were wanting a way out and wanted to find a different way to practice that allowed them to, be one, provide better care for their patients, and two have more autonomy and just a better lifestyle.
And a lot of them were pointing to. Like friends or colleagues who'd left the system and started practices on their own, but most people felt really intimidated by, trying to do that. And again, a light bulb went off seeing that there's all of this interesting value accruing with where AI is being built, especially in the back office and automation and taking on a lot of this operational lift that doctors don't have to do anymore.
And could I make it easier for these doctors who want to practice this way? To practice this way was really like the thesis that came about. And so that's where the genesis of our company came from. I have a co-founder who's our CTO. His name's Pedro Tabo. He's amazing. He was former head of engineering at a company called Stride Health.
And and he had been building some tools to automate the back office of medical practices. So the two of us got together and tried to really intersect. A couple of these trends of, what we can build with AI where the consumerization of health is taking kind of medicine and and where this trend of doctors who want more autonomy is also coming in.
So our company vibrant, intersects all of these. And and so that's the background.
Jason Jacobs: And so you had a day job working with some of these cutting edge tools. You had the medical scare and then that journey and introduction to functional health, et cetera. You thought about. Combining the two. At one point, did it switch from an exploration to actually planting a flag either publicly or even in your own head that this was a company
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah. Great question. We, first decided that we wanted to work together first. It was like a decision around, I knew I wanted a co-founder building a company. And so there was a lot of co-founder exploration I was going through and, some promising but failed attempts.
And when I met Pedro, we just clicked. And so there was a lot of just understanding that like, this is a person I wanna work with and how can we find, now that, that shared space of opportunity that makes the most of both of our skills and and interests. And so once, once we knew that decision, we then, both had this idea of business in a box and seeing if we could bring that that type of business model into the space of personalized medicine.
And I think what, when it really clicked for us was. The way we went about it was actually spending time at the beginning of last year actually going, ground level and building medical practices of people who'd work with us. And so we, we found a few early partners who were willing to take a risk on us and partner with us to open their medical practices.
And so we were just like, doing all the things behind the scenes of practice management without building any technology ourselves initially. And and that allowed us to see things, from that view of like really deeply understanding what's working, what's not, and where there's opportunity.
And so after we had some hypotheses that we wanted to prove out of this is where we could add value, especially with a platform that brings AI capabilities into it. And we validated that by within the first couple months of last year. And so very quickly after that we said, okay, let's start to.
We actually shifted our model from being this business in a box where we're working only with people starting new practices to this vertical AI platform that's actually applicable. Whether you have a new practice or a large existing practice, we can power that. And so we really leaned heavily into our technology chops.
In, in building this platform. I think there was a choice point we had between being a more operationally heavy model of helping people start new practices. Like I. Companies like Headway or Alma or Nourish which have been going gangbusters and doing great.
And and so we initially were chasing the thesis with a little bit of that in mind but quickly disprove that, like that's not actually what's gonna apply to the space. At least not right now for a few reasons. And then I think there's the other piece that we just as technologists, we're really excited to make this a company that's driven by ai, that is weaving AI into everything that we do and enable these doctors to do.
And ultimately, our vision is not just serving this niche of functional or integrative longevity, but I believe that all primary care doctors and primary care adjacent specialties are gonna look like this in the future. Where you're more data-driven, you're touching on more holistic parts of a of a patient's health.
And so what we build with our technology, I think has the potential to impact. A really broad swath of independent practices.
Jason Jacobs: And it, so the, some of the vision you talked about at the front end of this discussion sounded like a fundamentally different way to practice. And so part of that, where my mind goes is that part of that is a technology shift, but then it, I would imagine that there's a lot of other shifting involved to enable the technology to actually do its job in terms of processes, maybe even in terms of skill sets or certainly mindsets that are on the existing team.
And then there's of course things like privacy and compliance. And we, we know that, that healthcare is such a regulated corner of the world. Maybe just talk a bit about the role technology plays, but also what else is required to make these shifts and how much switching costs there is or isn't for practices that have been doing things the same way for a long time.
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah. Yeah. The interesting trend that we've seen over the last year and that I started to see very clearly as we got on the ground and we're just talking to hundreds of doctors, is not only, so there's like people most doctors who are in traditional settings, are, I think it's something like 50 to 60% of doctors report being burnt out these days.
And so most of them have that. That feeling. But, and at the same time for the first time in, the history of measuring this number I think it's something like over 50% of doctors are now employees. They're not working in private practice or physician owned groups. They're working in these large private equity or hospital systems.
And so you have this dynamic of consolidation that's happened that's probably driving this feeling also of burnout and people feeling like they're cogs in the wheel. And it's also creating because of insurance practices, people are feeling like their scope of practice is really narrowed to be so specific and incomplete in a way that, it's, patients are frustrated by this, like my story, but doctors are also frustrated by this.
And so many doctors we're seeing this trend towards re-skilling in a sense and going to practice. Functional, integrative, or longevity medicine. There's, and there's a few reasons behind that. One is many of these doctors have had their own health experiences with the chronic condition where it was not served by the traditional allopathic system.
And that made them believers in seeing that there's a different way that is more effective to treat patients and to deal with health, which is more systems based and not just kind of individual parts based. So that's one trend that we've seen. I think the other trend that we've seen that's like creating this mindset shift.
'cause I think what you're, what you kind, what the question was getting at, I think is a little bit of you can't just like. All of a sudden drop this in and expect people are gonna be able to work in this way. There's a mindset shift happening that we're capitalizing on right now.
And so part of what's happening is like this rising chronic conditions is making people see that there's a better way for treating. People because our traditional system just really sucks at treating chronic conditions. And then I think the other thing that's happened at the same time is like the rise of the Peter Atias and Huberman and the podcast crew.
That's spread amazing zero cost information about the importance of prevention in a way where, people have been talking about preventative health for forever. Every, everyone knows that, there, there's certain things you do, but now it's sexy and cool and it's called longevity, and so there's a whole different like framing on it that.
Is just like capturing people right now. And so I think that's another thing where doctors are like, this is what I wanna be doing. This is so much more interesting. This makes so much more sense from a first principles basis. This is how I wanna practice care. So you have these doctors who are influenced by these things, who are now leaving traditional systems.
They're going and getting re-skilled from. Groups like the Institute for Functional Medicine or the Association for Anti-Aging Medicine. These groups are seeing all time highs at their conferences and their training programs and certifications. And then these doctors are going and trying to go out on their own after that.
And the thing is, there's not a lot of places for them to go work if they have these skills. There are a handful of companies like Partially Health or Lifeforce or others but and then a handful of, large successful practices out there. But a lot of the times they see their only path as, going and opening their own shop, basically hanging their own shingle now that they have the certification and and want to practice this way.
And so the first thing that really needs to happen before. Anything we build will work is that this mindset shift needs to start taking place. And so it's happening, which is awesome. And I think it's just gonna get, it's just gonna keep growing. I think we're seeing even, younger generations of doctors are, start wanting to practice this way even earlier.
They don't have to go through the whole process of going to get their first job and then becoming disillusioned and then going back and retraining, what we're seeing with people in the millennial generation. But and I think there's, this mindset shift will continue to happen.
So that's one thing I think is the biggest thing. 'cause that's a hard thing that unless you have that awareness of. Working with a person in a systems based way it's gonna be hard to think about, applying a technology like this that really looks at a patient's whole system and allows you to think about their life and protocols that address not only just medication, but also sleep and, all these other aspects, nutrition et cetera.
And so that's one thing. Then the other thing is the business model side. Now this is one of the most difficult pieces to deal with in healthcare, right? Because the whole healthcare world is based on the incentives of insurance. And, large institutional healthcare is all driven by insurance.
And that's that's a reality. And when we look at. Insurance coverage for this kind of care? It does exist. Insurance will cover, some preventative visits. They'll cover some chronic condition management. They'll cover things like remote patient monitoring, so you can use wearables.
But the amount of coverage that the actual reimbursement rates around these things are so low that they maybe cover, a. Third maybe, of the cost of people providing this kind of care. And so what we're seeing is and there's also a lot of so currently this is the state. My, my expectation is that this will change and that we'll continue to see more and more coverage.
But current, the state of things is that insurance doesn't actually do a lot for people who want to practice this way. Because it takes a little more time, it takes, more space with the patients. There's less reimbursement around things like there is some reimbursement on nutrition care or coaching but not a ton.
And I think that's a problem with the way that our system is incentivized. It's not incentivized around prevention, it's incentivized around treatment once somebody is sick. And so we really just need to shift. Shift to thinking there. But what we're seeing in this piece of the market is that consumers, patients are so frustrated with the care that they're getting.
Similar to what I had, that experience of I don't wanna be forced down this path, that traditional medicine is forcing me, even if that's what my insurance is covering. I'm so motivated to find a doctor who I will pay out of pocket because it's clear value to me that like my health is worth it.
And and even, the way that there's a lot of high deductible plans and things like that now, so people are actually paying a bit more in general, out of pocket for their healthcare. And so we're seeing the rise of these. Cash-based clinics. The direct primary care if you're familiar with DPC or Direct primary Care, that's been around for a long time as a movement, but it's been niche and a small percentage of overall healthcare in the us.
And now we're seeing a rise in that. I think because of this consumerization of care. There's so much that is now, I think the data that we can have in our hands as patients, as consumers, that we can get through these direct to consumer routes is really powerful. But also the treatments that we can go get and find on the internet, and, if you really want GLP ones and you can't find the doctor to pri prescribe it to you like, or your doctor won't prescribe it to you, there's somebody on the internet who will, right?
And you can go piece together this care yourself. And then I think you also have all of these things that are not covered by insurance, but are this borderline between wellness and medicine that are really impactful for your health. Whether that's supplements or things like, related to exercise or heat and cold therapy or things like that.
And those things are not insurance covered, but they are core to our health. And so I think you see. This model and mindset in Americans shifting in a way that hasn't been the case in a long time where people are spending more than ever on wellness in this intersection of prevention and medicine.
And so cash pay as a business model is actually a fundamental, piece of what we're enabling and what we're building for. And because we're building for this model that is first not insurance based, we can actually build a better product for doctors that's built around clinical flows that are more logical, intuitive for how their practice works and not just how an insurance billing process works.
So we've gotten a lot of feedback on wow, this is so much better than than all of the other tools out there because it's not built for this insurance model.
Jason Jacobs: S with the DPC I would assume that people still have insurance. And if they do are they just paying for all the stuff out of pocket on top of all the coverage that they're also paying for insurance and not taking advantage of the coverage that they have? How does it work?
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah, there's a range of things, a range of ways people are covered now and and so I think generally speaking, what I've seen is that people tend to have coverage that they're not using for primary care in particular. They may use it for urgent care, they may use it for definitely for, large events for surgeries and things.
And then definitely for things like prescriptions, lab orders and a bunch of the ancillary things, but the actual experience of being able to, go and see a doctor who you value who maybe gives you some more time, who's maybe doing more things around prevention and working with you in a more holistic way.
Is something that. And they're willing to pay for. And you can also use your HSAs and FSAs in many cases. So you might be able to there's now a range of ways to think about covering that cost that isn't just out of pocket. And then I think the other thing I'd say is like.
The DPC movement, is, was pretty much like a tea party movement around, around medicine and just, I think traditional DPC is based around just being able to have a primary care doctor. But what we're seeing now in, in this. Next iteration on it in what we're calling personalized medicine.
So longevity, integrative, functional. It's not just about go having a doctor who you can go to when you're sick. It's about getting ahead on, on prevention and also dealing with chronic conditions in a way that is very different. Like you need somebody who could sit down with you, think about your lifestyle and then really help you tweak and be patient with like long-term changes that you need to make.
And that's just such a different way than traditional primary care operates, even traditional DPC. And so you're seeing this new model that engages with patients and more of, a lot of these are like membership driven models because it really works to make sure a patient is engaged and with you for at least a six to 12 month period.
Jason Jacobs: There's a couple different threads that I've, I'd love to pull on. One is just getting more specific about what the product does today and then directionally where it's going. And the other is just the balance of you, you mentioned that this is technology heavy and that you're leaning a lot on ai.
And you also mentioned spending a bunch of time doing everything manually in the earliest days with the customers. And I'd love to just talk about that balance of customer development versus building, especially when the tools that you're building with are changing so quickly. And we can take those in whatever order you'd or you can combine 'em, what, whatever works.
Sunita Mohanty: Okay, cool. Cool. Okay. So yeah, I love it. I love it. I see the thread across all of it. The, I'll talk about the, what we've built and then I think that will give you a sense for those other questions too. Our platform is this all in one? EHR, electronic health record, practice management and layer of AI support on top of that.
So if you're a doctor and a lot of the doctors we talk to, they run lean practices. Either they're like a solo practitioner or maybe there's one to three. We're targeting this smaller segment of independent practices. Not like large multi-site, multi provider yet. We are starting to look at that and starting to work with them.
But we've started with these kind of early stage groups so to speak. And if I'm a doctor, what really frightens me the most is taking on a lot of overhead and employees and trying to like. Figure out. Now I'm, I not only have to be a doctor, but I have to be a manager and a business owner.
And trying to reduce that burden for them was our number one goal. And what's amazing is with the promise of AI and where we're going with things, we can actually start to build, basically their ai, ag gentech workforce that's doing a bunch of things for them in the background that you don't necessarily need a lot of headcount to manage anymore.
So things like scheduling that's already been there. But, we have a really easy way to schedule, do complete your patient's intake. Your just all the basics of an EHR complete their, collect their medical records order prescriptions, order labs, order imaging order supplements and then have telehealth visits or regular visits.
All of that is in one place. So the other problem we've seen in trying to piece this together, not only is there a lot of headcount, there's also a lot of pieces of technology that these doctors are stitching together. 'cause in, in a lot of practices today, you have a different piece of technology to do each of those things that I just said.
And you have some pr practice management platforms that have started to pull more of this together, but still, there's like your EHR and you need your messaging platform. And then people are adding on top of that their data platform that pulls wearables and then they're adding on top of that the lab ordering platform.
And then they're still using spreadsheets to pull all of the data together and manually put that in. And then you need a assist a virtual assistant who's helping you with all the data. And so it's pretty complex for one person, or two people to manage all of this like swarm of technology.
So the first thing we thought is. Awesome, easy. Like we need to if we're building towards a future where we know that AI agents are gonna play a pretty big role in being able to help with a lot of the operational tasks, especially, we need to make sure we have an ability to control the workflows.
And that was a choice point we made early on. Are we building on top of other people's EHRs or does it mean that we have to build the whole vertical stack ourselves? And which way is gonna be better in both, both ways have pluses and minuses. If we build on top of other people's EHRs, then it's an easier adoption, process.
And that's the way a lot of these AI scribes work, right? Like you can just have them on the side. And scribing a visit and you copy and paste that information into an ER and so you don't have to redo your whole workflow. We made the choice to actually build the vertical stack. We are the EHR layer and this, everything on top of that.
And the reason we did that is because it gives us much more capability to, to do, to get into this layer of autonomy and autonomous agents that we want, we believe we can do super well. We took on that risk we're the nice thing about building today is that. There are amazing tools that allow us to build faster.
So we built on top of an open source EHR called Med Plum which is an amazing resource that I think more and more like health tech companies are using today. But it allows us to not have to take on all of that privacy risk and work with a partner who has taken on that risk for us and made sure that everything we're doing is set up and stored in, in a HIPAA compliant way.
And so to, they take care of all of our compliance needs and and they basically have components that we can use and then build our UI and AI layer on top of it. So that's allowed us to move a lot faster. The other things that we're doing are integrating with a number of these point solutions.
So as a clinician you don't have to experience the fact that there's 10 different point solutions. Our platform integrates with them, so again. We haven't built everything from scratch. We've pulled in different integrations like with a prescription ordering or supplement ordering or things like that.
But in a way where we are, that we are, we're the layer that pulls it all together. And for a clinician or an end user, you just see one thing. You only log into one thing. You just have to, work around and get familiar with one set of processes. And from there, we can take care of the delegating of of actions to these different platforms on your behalf.
So that's allowed us to, again, move a lot faster. We've built this platform and like super we started building it in Q4 last year, and we now have several practices who are running their whole business on it already. And I think there are two things that allowed us to do that.
One is having these components that we can build on top of. And two is building with ai. We have a really small ENG team, but they operate like a much larger ENG team because of cursor and, the capabilities of AI engineering these days. And so I think those two things have been pretty, pretty remarkable.
It's an amazing time to be building. And so yeah, that sort of I think that kind of gets at the questions, but let me know if I missed anything in your questions you were asking.
Jason Jacobs: You didn't miss any, but I have. A new question. Do you have agents writing code yet internally?
Sunita Mohanty: We do, yeah, we do have some agents writing code. We have we're using Anthropics, Claude and like the Agentic framework. And we have agents both like writing code, but also like delegating and doing tasks on behalf of our clinicians. And so that's something you'll see more and more through the product as the year goes on.
So I think one thing I didn't hit on is like, what does AI look like in our product right now? And our product right now, you have all of that the basics of a clinical operations that you might want when you're a doctor. But on top of that, we have a clinical copilot that is like a chat GPT, but it's actually internal to the to the the EHR.
So it's drawing on the patient record and any new information coming from there, as well as a corpus of knowledge that we've added that. In our case, we've specifically started with a set of knowledge around functional, integrative and longevity medicine. We also allow clinics to add their own corpus if they want to.
So similar to how a custom GPT or a cursor custom customizing cursor works, you can just give it a set of rules that apply to your clinic. And then when you interact with the ai. And ask it questions to help you prepare for a visit or help you interpret labs. It can respond back to you with the specifics that are tailored to your way of practicing.
So that's one really powerful piece of clinical decision support that we've included. And then another piece of AI is around just the flow of scribing. That's something that, I, I don't know. The stats are crazy on how quickly doctors have adopted AI scribes because it's also just, it makes so much sense.
It makes your day so much easier. You're not note taking. You have something that is charting on your behalf. And so that is natively built into our EHR, so you don't have to cut and paste. And it also makes the context of the scribe more accurate when it's drawing on the history of the patient record, which you don't have to insert into it.
So we have the scribe built in for anytime you have a visit it automatically comes we'll summarize and spit out a note in the format that you want as a provider. So that's another kind of layer of AI built in. And then the third layer. Is around these agents. So after a visit, if you have follow-ups that you need to do with this patient, like ordering labs or prescriptions or any of that, usually what happens is that takes a handful of minutes for every follow-up and those handful of minutes add up.
And over the course of a week, that's 10 hours of a doctor's time just doing kind of follow ups. And so instead of a doctor sitting there and clicking, to finish a lab order or things, we can we've created these AI agents that can do this on your behalf. And so it tees up the approvals that you need to be involved in, but it means that you don't need to sit there clicking through, annoying screens or inputting information over and over again.
That's a process of Web 2.0 that does not need to exist anymore. And so we've built that in natively into our system.
Jason Jacobs: Now I know you mentioned before we started recording that you had listened to some other episodes. I don't know if you happen to listen to the singular one but the. I'm having a deja vu because, so singular we'll see if I can explain it but basically it's a two person team and they are selling into SMBs and emerging growth companies, but smaller and they're a SaaS model.
And we haven't talked about business model yet for you which I'd also wanna make sure we touch on. But it's a SaaS model, but essentially it's consolidating SaaS where companies that have 30 or 40 or 50 different SaaS tools, right? It's like they, they use open source and these Lego building blocks to to essentially provide suitable alternatives, but that are bundled into their system where it's one subscription and they can start ripping out all these tools that become redundant over time.
It sounds pretty similar. And they also, yeah but one difference is that, so they have, and I don't know. What your revenues are, how many practices you, you work with, and feel free to share or not share. But they have, I think it's six customers and 40 5K an MRR. They're a three month old company.
And their intent on building this way where they build in an agent army, not an employee army, they stay small and they don't raise any outside funding and they think they can get to a hundred million in. Annual revenue that way. Now they're a long way from that, so who knows if they can, but that's at least their intent heading out.
Maybe they shift along the way. You have raised some money already and you're starting to think about more formal round with institutional partners doing it the more traditional venture way. And I'm curious why and whether you wrestled with that. And to the extent that there are differences, it'd be interesting to understand, is it just a philosophical difference, entrepreneur to entrepreneur, or is it more category specific where there's criteria in this category that make it more conducive to the traditional venture model?
And as an entrepreneur, how do you know which ca you know how to tell when you're thinking about how to capitalize your own company?
Sunita Mohanty: That's a really yeah.
Jason Jacobs: but Yeah. But you see what I'm,
Sunita Mohanty: No, that's great. I was paging through and I saw that I saw some clips of singular and it caught my eye. But I'll have to listen to the whole thing, but I do think it's it's a really awesome time to be building where you can build so much more leanly and we are I would say we're not.
So far in, on that side of the spectrum where we're just saying, we're gonna build everything through AI agents. I think there is a challenge in our space and in a way that we can differentiate ourselves to honestly from the other pro technology providers that, that we're competing against, which is like.
By being responsive and actually having some touch points. Because I think one of the biggest frustrations from our customers that we hear is that all of the companies that they work with just have the worst. And I won't say any names, but they have just terrible customer service and responsiveness and the fact that we're, I actually think some of our the sales have been all founder driven and people just are so passionate about what we're building, but also that love the fact that we're like moving fast and and that they can get feedback in.
And so I worry that if we lean too far in the direction of it's only built by AI that we would lose some of that humanness that is part of the sale process. But I do think it means we don't have to build a massive team. And I am a hundred percent in the category of not playing the traditional game in a sense of raising all the money I can and building a massive team and I think there's a better way that we can build right now.
But I do think it's a balance. And there are nice parts about venture, which is it does help give some credibility. It does help open some, doors if we get the right partners in. And I'm balancing as a founder, I'm balancing those two pa those like pluses and minuses a little bit.
But I'm trying to think about it in a way where, I, I don't have to fully play the old school VC game. That's pushed so many founders to a place where you're, you haven't built, you're ended up in a, in a. State that, that you didn't intend to, or you haven't built a company that you wanted to, or you lost control of the game.
But I do still think it's helpful for us, especially right now. The biggest thing we need to do is increase our velocity of building. And we can do that both with ai, but it also requires capital in humans. And and so we need a little bit of that upfront fuel to the fire that comes from bc.
Jason Jacobs: And there's another recent episode that comes to mind and that is Nudge Money. That one I think just published this week. But but the reason I bring that one up is that what we talked about in that episode was that they're selling into credit unions. And credit unions are nonprofits and tend to be technology.
Laggards and they're more focused on community and mission and less on being at the tippy tip of the spear from a technology standpoint. He also mentioned that they were constrained just by SOC two compliance about what they can and can't do with the tools, which meant that they're never gonna be at the tip of the spear.
They're gonna be laggards alongside their credit unions by design. I would've thought that doctors and medicine would be in a similar category, but are you constrained either by the technology laggard ness to the extent that's a word? I don't even know if that's a word. Or by compliance in terms of how much you can push the envelope as these tools continue to evolve.
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah, great question. I do think there's a whole range of technology like comfort and savviness. We are for sure I. Right now working with people who are more on the early adopter side of the spectrum, I would say. But, when you look across like the larger market it's to ask doctors to continue to like change technology.
First of all, technology for doctors has sucked. It's not made their lives easier. It's made their lives harder. And so a lot of people have a visceral reaction to, to the idea of adopting new technologies, especially if they're like older and they've been around for a little bit and have seen the, implementation of thers and everything.
I think you have. So you do have that mindset, especially amongst probably like older doctors. And then you have people who are using chat GPT and in their lives and are expecting that to be, the way that their technology looks. So I think you have that whole range represented. And we're capturing more of the early adopter right now, but I do believe what's awesome about this wave of technology is.
It's so much more intuitive and easier to use than, previous technologies because it's just get the ui the interfaces are getting easier and easier, right? So I do think this means it will be easier for these, laggards so to speak, to, to adopt. But it also means yeah, I think in terms of the compliance piece a hundred percent there are serious compliance needs that we always need to be mindful of.
And I do think if you like, give it all up to automation, like there's risks, right? There's risks of data leakage, there's risks, like the AI won't know that you know how to properly structure and keep things clean. But I and so I think there is some of that. The other piece.
There's this debate happening right now of AI replacing doctors. This is something I, I didn't talk about yet. Our whole thesis is that because of not only regulatory capture, where, doctors have licenses, and for AI to be leaping into that same kind of category of practice, it's gonna take a while for regulatory capture to to get there.
It probably will happen, but I think it's just gonna take a while. And and so there's that, but not only that, there's also the human experience of care that, the act of actually interacting with somebody who's listening to you about your problems and making you feel seen and helping you tweak and understand things.
Personally, I believe that's a really big piece of where humans are gonna continue to, have a superpower is in this anything relational and any task that has a relational element to it. And then there's a bunch of the operational things where AI will be really good at, but because the active delivering care is relational I think there will always be this need for, or, at least as far as until AI gets really good and not uncanny and crosses all that.
I think we will need this human in a loop kind of workflow and concept in a lot of what the product is. And so that also makes me think we should have humans in the loop in how we build a product and how we understand the product and that there is some like reflective balance between AI and human capacity.
Jason Jacobs: W what is the business model and as you've positioned it with different clients, the ones that have moved forwards, does it tend to be, is it a cost decision? Is it a providing better care and experience decision? Is it a being able to charge more decision? What what is it that they're buying in that?
It's compelling them to move forward with this young upstart that brings with it inherent risk just in the, by the nature of how old the company is and versus, versus companies that have been, that maybe don't have the same value prop but have been around a lot longer with bigger balance sheets and customer bases and things like that.
Sunita Mohanty: absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's so we are SaaS model. So we, that's our business model. And people buy because one they see. How this is gonna improve their workflow in their lives. So they're actually, I think for the first time looking at this in a way that will actually save them time and that time can translate to revenue.
So I think they're seeing the like. The the calculation in their head of, if we are able to not spend time doing all these things, we are able to open time to more patients, to more possibilities and to being more efficient in our practice. And that's what our goal is to really prove is as we get these early partners up and running and understand more, so we're still pretty early with people actually like putting our product into their into their practice.
And so we'll have more data on that in the next. Coming months. But I do believe that's the biggest you know what the minute we can start to say that, by using us, you've actually increased your revenue capacity. I think it's a clear sell. And and so even if they're paying a little bit more for our technology, because it does have a little bit more to it they, so it's, we're not competing on cost.
We're not trying to be the lowest cost player out there. It does people very clearly see the value because of the time it's adding back and the revenue potential, it adds back for them.
Jason Jacobs: Getting back to the internal. Team for a moment. Another episode I did recently was with a company called Hybrid, and what was interesting about that one is that they have four co-founders and only one of 'em is technical by training, but all four of them are writing code. You talked about having a smaller team by design, but you also talked about having a strong technical co-founder from a traditional tech background.
How do you think about scaling the team? I, and I'm, and I am not as much talking about the size, but it's will the technical people do technical things or are these tools making it that everybody does technical things.
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah, it's a really interesting question right now. The technical people are doing the technical things and like doing the building. Just 'cause we have so much to do with all of the things. I use a lot of AI and everything I do for that's non-technical and I am, I lead kind of product of the team.
And so I've even been using AI to generate early like wire frames and things like that of the ideas I have putting together PRDs, like not having to write all that stuff out anymore is amazing. But we still, I think AI gets us like. 50, 60% of the way there and would still really helpful to have just badass designers and engineers who are good at what they do.
I don't, I haven't found a way for AI to replace that, that need yet. And so we, yeah, so we still have a really awesome team. We do work with, so my co-founder Pedro, he is Cuban Spanish. And so we actually have a great La Eng team. And so I think one of the other awesome pieces about, what we're seeing is yes.
There's a lot of talent, like I'm Bay Area based and we know, a lot of the best AI talent for sure is here, but the bar for great engineering being able to hire great engineers the bar is high, but like the people have really risen to that bar outside of the us.
And I think that's largely because these tools are so available to anybody. And so now you're just seeing this like democratization of great talent in a way. I think it it, it can be tricky to build teams that are cross border and things like that, but I'm grateful that Pedro has done this in his previous role and and so we've got some great talent that we're working with
Jason Jacobs: Huh
Sunita Mohanty: and we're hiring a founding engineer by the way.
And yeah, which is exciting. I.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. And and to, to the extent you want to add more color there, in case it's intriguing for any of our listeners, feel free to take a moment to do
Sunita Mohanty: yeah. We're looking for just a rockstar high capacity eng who's full stack. You will be, on our team you're full stack. And so that does mean digging a lot into working with LLMs and evals and all that, but also building, the integrations we need the backend.
There's just such a range of problems that we get to work on. And I think we're really at the forefront of a lot. So this founding end role, we want somebody who is quite well-rounded. We have more specialists who focus on, mobile who focus on front end, who focus on some of the, a AI stuff.
But we're looking for just a, an all around kind of full stack rockstar. So if that sounds like you and you like the problems we're solving, would love to talk.
Jason Jacobs: Great. And and I'll certainly keep my eyes out for that role as well. When it comes to how AI is changing, how startups get built and funded, we've talked a bit about the efficiencies that you're gaining and how it is important to have the core expertise, but how it's giving those expertise leverage because of these tools.
What do you think the implications will be on competition, defensibility, and even things like company life cycles and exit multiples and stuff like that? Will it change the game a lot from a venture math standpoint, or will it be more of the same?
Sunita Mohanty: That's a great question. I think, we're seeing. It's so competitive out there to build anything these days, right? Like it's just that, anybody can build, you can pop up a company, you can pop an AI company and build something. And I think where defensible value lies is in going into these markets where there is a true like vertical kind of data set that you build, and the moat that you build is really around being the best.
At this specific, business model or this like end-to-end need that a customer has. I think that's gonna start to be where there's more and more defensible value. Like we have, now people are drowning in point solutions. And as we get into the world of AI agents and more and more automation, I think we're gonna move away from.
Point solutions. To be honest, I think you're gonna see more and more companies like ours that are vertical staff solutions for certain verticals that are really crushing it. And that, that are helping that specific industry or that, specific group with this end-to-end approach to their business that is much more efficient.
And I feel like that's actually where it's gonna be defensible. And, people who the defensibility will come from just, the more and more data you have around that type of business or around that type of person, the better your product will be, the more effective, the more efficient it'll be.
But I do. It's gonna continue to just be super competitive in every single field because of all the the barrier to entry to start something is low. And so I think that just means, there's more and more people building, which is awesome. But it's gonna be yeah, it's gonna be hot out there.
And I think, in terms of what that means for venture returns does feel like the game and venture is gonna change. There is probably there's, a barbell effect that seems to be happening where you have the massive AI companies, like the foundational companies that are building.
Whether it's foundation models or ear infra that need a ton of capital and hopefully will have like returns generated from all that capital. And then I think you have a lot of these asset light companies, right? Like the, or, maybe even bootstrapped or maybe like this kind of idea of seed strapping and raising just a little bit of money and then going and building a ton.
And then I'm curious what's gonna happen in this middle ground of growth stage companies that are used to, I think right now you see a lot of these I guess some of the ones, there's a few trends in either like more operationally heavy or more acquisition heavy like needing to fund a lot of acquisition spend and play a very competitive game on, on that side.
And I wonder what's gonna happen to those companies, to be honest. And where like the returns are gonna how these companies that are raising, $250 million rounds, but all of that's going into acquisition spend. Like how is that where does that go? And what's gonna happen in terms of what outcomes are possible for those companies
Jason Jacobs: I'm far from an expert on venture math, but one thing that I've been thinking about just when it comes to all these. Applications that are, vertical specific applications or I guess what you're talking about more the, I dunno if platform is the right word, but vertical one-stop shops but let's call it, but if they are asset light, does it become a game from a fund standpoint of a lower failure rate and more base hits and doubles versus the higher failure rate and, the one or two outliers that that, that return the fund?
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah maybe. I think that might be the case, which is interesting. And then, I think the reason why these vertical saaf companies will succeed, I think also is because it's take our niche of the world. There are people who are not super tech savvy.
There are people who are not wanting to change products all the time. Like they really wanna find something that does a great job for what they're and that's why, traditionally it's not been a great idea to start and build an EHR for these, this segment. But I do believe we're in a moment where people are really motivated to switch their technology right now because they see what's possible and the delta between the things they're using and like an AI natives platform is so great that people are motivated and for us to come in and help solve that problem that they're expecting to be able to do is a great point.
But, for the. Third, fourth, and fifth company that might come in and try to do this. I wonder, how much like First mover advantage is really gonna help in some of these cases where you're dealing with like more Main Street type companies that don't want to optimize their technology.
They just wanna get on a better stack and then again, set it and forget it and just be doing things. I'm I think there's a lot of industries like that, that AI companies are going to have some great wins in. And so I'm excited about that.
Jason Jacobs: I'm sure you're you have more than enough to think about in the category that you're in and with the company that you're building, but if you weren't building this company and you weren't doing it in this category are there criteria that you think make this category so interesting that are, like, are there other categories that you feel like, oh like if I wasn't doing this, I could go and take the same model in that category.
And if so, what are the categories that are most interesting to you and why?
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah, great question. I think the things to look for are categories where like people, like the customer feels underserved from their technology. And whether that's because a lot of the options haven't been, like, updated in a while or they haven't been or yeah, they, or just, people haven't been building for those industries 'cause they're sleepy or less like sexy or whatever.
I think that's really where you wanna go look, and I love the companies that are being built right now that are tackling these boring industrial spaces. That I think there's just massive opportunity to solve these problems that are not like the most sexy consumer thing to be going after, but there's just big opportunity to.
Build better systems and tools. I think another this category is more in like the health space, but I had explored this a couple years ago, but now I'm really excited to see a few companies that are starting to win in building for physical therapists and pt. And if you look at the technology that PTs use it is so bad.
The, it's it, and these poor PTs spend like hours and hours of their they end at 6:00 PM and then they're doing hours of work until 11:00 PM to try to get their notes in and everything. And I think those are the kinds of businesses where, people are really in pain because of their technology.
And so now building a better tech stack for them, it just, you'll go out with that and you'll win.
Jason Jacobs: And my last question just as you're navigating this journey given the rate that things are changing, h how challenging has it been to stay on top of these changes? And do you have a peer group that is, that you lean on to help keep each other educated and okay. 'cause one of the things I'm thinking about is just all these great guests are coming on the show and just, is there a way to help build a peer group around them that could be valuable?
And I don't know if there is, and just setting up another slack room doesn't feel like the answer, but that's why I asked the question.
Sunita Mohanty: I love that. Yeah, it's, there's so much to stay on top of. I think, there are all of the newsletters and all of the like friends who are building in this space who we trade notes, ad hoc, but yeah it'd be great to be part of a community. I think there's we I was a member of South Park Commons.
I dunno if you've heard of them. They're a great group.
Jason Jacobs: I have. Yeah, I've been there before. Just as a guest.
Sunita Mohanty: Yeah. They're great. And I feel like that kind of community where people are like trying the latest and, sharing what they're trying and really like the value of that community was super high in terms of being around people who are just building right now.
So I've found thing like that in particular to be helpful. But, I think like slack groups are challenging. And so the, all these dinners in San Francisco happening right now where there's all these AI builders and AI dinners, like San Francisco is so popping right now because of ai in the world.
And I think that's where some of the most helpful conversations have been happening, where you just, whether it's our investors who are pulling together folks or I don't know all these folks bringing together AI builders, I agree that there's a great role to play in that space that you are suited to do.
And whether I, I do think some of that conversation happens more in like spaces where we can actually talk to each other and Slack tends to be a little bit limited for that. And so whether that's meet meetings or virtual hangs or some sort of in person get together I think those all tend to be really helpful.
Jason Jacobs: Great. Good food for thought. Is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I did? Or any parting words for listeners?
Sunita Mohanty: If you are a clinician who is interested, we'd love to talk. We've got a great set of early partners who are demoing and working with us as design partners. Love to talk. And if you're interested in roles in our team also love to talk. We definitely have our founding engineer role open, but we're hiring a few more roles as the year goes on and always looking for great people.
And I just really appreciate the time and the opportunity. Jason, thanks so much for having me on.
Jason Jacobs: I loved the discussion. I loved learning more about vibrant practice and looking forward to watching your progress and wishing you every success.
Sunita Mohanty: I appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks so much.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for tuning into The Next Next. If you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player in addition to the podcast. Which typically publishes weekly. There's also a weekly newsletter on Substack at the next next.substack.com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground I'm covering, areas I'm tackling next, and where I could use some help as well.
And it's a great area to foster discussion and dialogue around the topics that we cover on the show. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week.