Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay there?

Ganesh Padmanabhan: About two and a half years. During that time, we went from about $3 million to about $30 million ARR. It was very fast growth. It was early days of AI and we learned a lot.

Sramana Mitra: That is one of the early AI companies.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: So, that was the start of my journey in the spectrum outside corporate.

Sramana Mitra: What happened after that?

Ganesh Padmanabhan: I think it was 2019 or 2-3 years after I started there when I started noticing a trend in the industry where enterprises will embark on an AI journey only to get stuck because their data infrastructure wasn’t ready to help them scale.

They’d go into an initial project, solve a meaningful problem, and then look around and realize that they don’t have the infrastructure needed to enable ETL and get the data ready for AI. Language models were not there; we were not really good at understanding unstructured data at that time. So, I wanted to solve that problem.

There was another early stage company called Molecula. Molecula was an open source project called Pilosa, which was a very popular data engineering project where you would help collect disparate sources of semi-structured data sets across the enterprise, and then organize them or ETL [Extract, Transform, Load] them in a way that you can solve meaningful machine learning problems. I convinced its founder to launch a commercial business called Molecula and joined as their first commercial hire as chief revenue officer.

So, I joined a much earlier state startup, helped them raise a seed, and a Series A. We got some early success, and I spent about a year and a half there building out that company. I left around the Series A, mostly because Covid hit, and my personal situation changed at that time. I thought it was the right inflection time. It didn’t work out beyond that, right? I had to choose between running a startup versus taking care of the family. At that time, I had young kids under five years of age. So, I did that and took about a year reflecting on what I want to do next in 2021. I launched Autonomize in 2022.

Sramana Mitra: So, what is the premise of Autonomize?

Ganesh Padmanabhan: This was right after we realized that humanity as a whole can be brought to the knees by a single virus that’s not even a nano-centimeter in size. It made us all realize how fragile human life is, right? I was also exposed to the state of the healthcare infrastructure around the world, the access to care being a huge issue. We don’t produce half as many medical professionals that we need to support billion people around the world.

I saw a few things. On the altruistic side, I wondered what I’m going to tell my grandkids – that I’m going to help people shop more and search more with AI? Or, I can do something more meaningful. I wanted to do something impactful like you have done with One Million by One Million.

Second, I also realized that AI is going to fundamentally reshape the way we communicate and talk. I think the two big bets I wanted to make was radical decentralization of people and how people think. You’re seeing the impact of globalization five years in, right? There’s the anti-globalization move around the world. The pockets of knowledge are going to be in the edges, not at the core, right?

The second is ultimate automation and having intelligent, invisible, technology that’ll make the quality of work and life a lot better. For me as a technologist, what better way to spend the rest of my life trying to take all of that amazing technology and applying it to the most impactful thing you can do for humanity, which is human health, right?

That was the premise for Autonomize. How do you autonomously automate/augment healthcare as an ecosystem to deliver care faster, give better access to care for people? As an offshoot, nobody in their right mind goes and becomes a doctor except for altruistic reasons. Think about it, it doesn’t pay as well as Google software engineers.

Sramana Mitra: It pays well, though.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: It pays well, but then it’s still not like an early stage startup engineer.

Sramana Mitra: But your thinking is a bit distorted because you swim in this world of startups, and people’s expectations are high. For average normal people, it’s a pretty good job.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: It’s a good salary, but think about the quality of life. You spend about 50-60 % of the time doing administrative documentation.

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: You listen to sick people all day, you have to make hard decisions. It’s thankless in a lot of cases, especially if you’re a specialist.

Sramana Mitra: It’s very meaningful for people.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: They only do it because the personal mission inspires them, and of course, the economic opportunity now. But if you put them in the center of it, the system completely forgets about those knowledge workers in the industry and the patients. We have this incentive structure that is aligned towards other mechanisms like capitalism. You’re trying to do better by doing health. There was a huge gap in the way healthcare was administered and operated around the world. Autonomize started with the premise, “If you can just empower that knowledge worker, that doctor, the nurse, the caregiver, and the researcher by reducing the admin burden for them and improving their throughput, then you can solve access to care and the cost of care problems”.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI
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