Healthcare
See the 10-slide presentation a startup used to land $8 million from General Catalyst to speed up medical research with AI
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- Medeloop just raised $8 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst.
- The startup uses AI to help speed up research tasks such as grant applications and data collection.
- It’s working with researchers at universities in California and Canada.
Dr. Rene Caissie, Medeloop’s cofounder and CEO, first got into healthcare tech in 2011, when he built his own electronic-medical-records system based on his gripes with existing software.
That company was acquired in 2015.
Caissie, who was born in Canada and previously worked as an oral and facial surgeon, wanted to build tech to solve problems he’d faced as a doctor and researcher. In 2021, he left Montreal to attend Stanford University’s business school to get his MBA and build a tech platform, now known as Medeloop, that would help him conduct research quicker.
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Two years later, Medeloop has raised $8 million in seed funding led by the top healthcare venture firm General Catalyst. Maven Ventures, the Ovo Fund, NV investments, and angel investors including former Merck CEO Ken Frazier also participated in the round, which brought Medeloop’s total funding to nearly $10 million.
Medeloop’s platform uses artificial intelligence to help simplify and speed up each step of the research process, including submitting grant applications, getting project funding, collecting data from patients enrolled in a trial, and writing the final research paper.
The startup launched six months ago and is now being used by researchers at institutions such as the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, San Francisco, and McGill University in Canada, where Caissie used to teach surgery.
Medeloop plans to rapidly expand its team with talent from the US and Canada. The Silicon Valley startup said it planned to hire more than 200 engineers and AI computer scientists from Canada by 2025.
Medeloop’s platform can be used for all types of research. But Caissie and his team decided to concentrate on rare-disease research after, in late 2021, Caissie’s 8-year-old daughter was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome, a neurological condition that causes chronic and severe pain, usually in an arm or leg.
The company then began working with Dr. Elliot Krane, a Stanford professor and pain-medicine pediatrician, to figure out how to design its tech to study CRPS. Krane is now set to use the platform for his own research, Caissie said.
“It became an extremely mission-driven project and company,” Caissie said. “We weren’t just building a product to make money. We were building this project to save a child.”
Medeloop shared the pitch deck it used to raise $8 million in seed funding. The startup removed confidential financial information and client names before sharing it with Insider.
Here’s the 10-slide presentation Medeloop used to raise $8 million.
Medeloop estimates it can help researchers shrink a multiyear project into a weekslong one by using AI, including generative AI, to aid in tasks including writing grants and collecting patient medical histories.
Medeloop
Medeloop’s AI tools, especially its large language models, are the biggest selling point of the platform, Caissie said. The tech can take a question from a researcher and transform it into an algorithm to output the desired information.
Medeloop
For example, Caissie said, Krane could ask aloud to the platform, “What is driving flares in my patient population?”
Medeloop can turn that question into the appropriate code and sift through the available data to churn out an answer.
“We’ve never shown this to a research institution that did not say yes to the product,” Caissie said.
Medeloop charges a monthly subscription fee for its platform.
Medeloop
Medeloop provides a back-end portal for researchers as well as a patient-facing app. Through the app, researchers can collect a patient’s medical history by asking the patient to log in to their online portals at different hospitals or to connect devices such as Apple Watches.
Medeloop
Caissie said Medeloop could also help researchers collect patient data throughout a study by using the patient’s phone to gather information on their gait and balance as they walk, for example. That information is fed to researchers through the patient-facing app.
Caissie said Medeloop began raising money in June because the startup had been approached by so many universities interested in using the platform, even though it never invested in marketing efforts.
Medeloop
Now that Medeloop has funds to deploy its tech more broadly, Caissie said the startup wanted to “dominate” early-stage clinical research first. Medeloop plans to roll out its platform to more universities through the rest of this year.
Medeloop
Medeloop’s founding team has a wide variety of expertise — alongside Caissie, its three other cofounders are the AI researcher Raghav Samavedam, the geneticist and former consultant Josh Walonoski, and US Army Lt. Col. Andy Yakulis.
Medeloop
Clients plan to use the platform to study rare conditions such as the mitochondrial disease Leigh syndrome and the connective-tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, as well as more common diseases including type 2 diabetes, according to Medeloop.
Medeloop
Next year, Medeloop will focus on selling its platform to pharma and biotech companies, Caissie said.
Medeloop
“We’re a perfect tool for clinical trials, and we have been interacting with multiple big pharma companies,” Caissie said.
Medeloop