AI, Healthcare, and 700 Million Patients | Nicolas Abad, Telepatía

If you see healthcare software in LATAM, I think your eyes would bleed. Latin America has a shortage of supply. There's 30% fewer doctors. There's 43% preventable deaths.

There's 30% medical errors. My father passed away at 58 with a very weird tumor, which basically connects the two intestines, and he had hiccups for 10 days. If my father would have had a second brain or some AI to interact, that would have potentially saved him as a patient. And that's what we're trying to build.

You know, you're building something special when people move continents to work with you. That's pretty rare. A doctor using telepatia found out a treatment for a patient that extended the patient's life expectancy by like two years. He reached out and joined telepatia.

Our mission is to win the first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984 in Latin America. We think this is possible with an AI doctor. This product can go global and we can save approximately 5 million lives a year. That's more than penicillin and insulin combined.

Healthcare is fundamentally a supply and demand problem. Patients need care, but doctors, nurses, and healthcare systems have limited time and resources. In many parts of Latin America, those constraints are even more acute, with physician shortages, fragmented medical records, and limited healthcare infrastructure. Nicolas Abad believes AI can help close that gap.

After losing his father to a preventable medical error, Nico became focused on improving healthcare outcomes through technology. Today, his company, Telepatia, is building tools designed to help physicians make better decisions, reduce administrative burden, and improve access to care across the region. Gabriel Vasquez, Daisy Wolf, and Eva Steinman speak with Nico about healthcare, AI, and building for one of the world's largest underserved markets. Telepatia is building an AI doctor for Latin America, a region of over 700 million people with a massive doctor shortage and almost no software in his hospitals.

Nico Bhatt is the CEO and founder of Telepatia. He started Telepatia while he was at Stanford and since then raised a $9 million seed and moved to Sao Paulo to build this out. Telepatia now has thousands of doctors across the entire region. Nico, I'm really glad that you're here.

I'm dialing in today, so Daisy and Eva will take it from here, but I'll jump as we go. Nico, we first met in 2022. you had just shut down your first company and you were thinking about something more meaningful to do in your next chapter. Tell us the story of how you came to start this company and what it means to you.

For sure. So actually, Daisy, we met after an intense week and days in my life where I lost my father, my company and my girlfriend at the time. And my father, so end of 2022, my father passed away early, 58 years old with a preventable death. my father a doctor, my sister a doctor, my grandfather a doctor, my godmother a doctor.

And when this happened, I just became obsessed with health and healthcare and I wanted to dedicate my life to it. And actually, I reached out to Gabriel Vasquez, knowing you guys had a healthcare fund, to talk about healthcare because I wanted to dedicate my life to this. I then went to Stanford two years to try to understand healthcare, which healthcare is a very complex market, as we all know. It has a lot of actors.

It has payers, providers, pharma, patients, doctors, nurses. But at the end of the day, there's always a supply and demand of care. Basically, the patients demand care and the doctors and nurses supply care to those patients. What happened is that demand is infinite.

Health care is a universal right in Latin America. And there could even be more demand. You know, in education, there's something called the Bloom problem, where every kid with a tutor shifts academic outcomes to standard deviations to the right. The same thing could happen in health care.

If you gave everybody a doctor and a nurse, you could shift health outcomes and standard deviations to the right. But supply is finite. There's a finite amount of doctors and nurses. And if you double click a little bit on the supply, you see that Latin America has a shortage of supply.

There's 30% fewer doctors and 50% fewer nurses per capita than the developed countries. There's also a quality problem where there is 43% preventable deaths. There's 30% medical errors. And there's a productivity problem where doctors and nurses spend between 40% and 70% of their time on things that are not equal to patient care.

So what the region needs is way more doctors, but way better ones and way more efficient ones. And that's what we're trying to build. We're building AI doctors for doctors, built by doctors. And the first product is the product that would have saved my father as a patient and that he would have loved as a doctor.

My father's nickname was Telepatia, and that company is in his honor. And going back a little bit to my past company and mentioning the passion, it's interesting because I always joke a little now that no 80-year-old kid wants to go into e-commerce. 80-year-old kids want to be doctors, astronauts. And this is a company of my life.

This is what we're going to build. We want to win a Nobel Prize in medicine. The first one in Latin America since 1984. And that makes us very excited.

Amazing. Your family must be really proud. Tell us a little bit about what the product is and how it helps physicians. Yes, for sure.

So the first thing the product does is act as a second brain for physicians. So it's a second brain for doctors and it helps them transcribe the consultation. It gives them feedback live during the consultation. So what should I do with this patient?

And it has all the context of that consultation plus of the patient's medical record. Because in healthcare, there's something where context can be more important than IQ. And IQ is a game that will be won in Silicon Valley. We'll have Opus 4.

6, 4.7, 4.8, Mithos, etc. So it's all about the context.

And a 120 IQ doctor with all your medical record is a better doctor than Einstein, 160 IQ without your medical record. So it's all about giving this context to the doctors and helping them make better decisions as a second brain. So we help them transcribe the conversations. We help them ask questions about the patient, be it live during the consult or in the pre-charting of the patient.

And after the doctor finishes the consultation, we also tell the doctor, oh, maybe you should do this and you shouldn't do this. We respect doctor autonomy and doctors have to accept or reject our solutions. But this is the first product for doctors. And this product, we believe usability is paramount in healthcare and the doctors have to be very easy to use.

And if you see healthcare software in LATAM, I think your eyes would bleed. In the US too. It's suboptimal UX, to say the least. So we always wanted to make it the simplest experience for doctors.

So it's completely integrated to all the electronic medical records in Latin America. And Latin America is interesting because it's a region that has no EMR, no electronic medical record with more than 5% market share. So it's a very fragmented region. Right now we have over 30 clients and more than 22 EMRs.

So it's funny, but it's a catching Pokemon. You say, you've got to catch them all. You've got to catch all these EMRs. And that's what we do.

So the second part of the product is that it deeply integrated So the first one is the second brain for product number two deeply integrated into the EMR And then for institutions we help them give complete visibility on the institution on the patients the beds doctors nurses what happening in real time. Because if you think about a hospital or a health system, it's a very complex organism. It's like sending a rocket to space, but hospitals aren't equipped with the technology or the tooling to tackle the massive problems that they do.

So we help them with all of this. And the first thing we do is we help them surface insights that they don't have so they can chat with their data. What are the highest cost patients this quarter? What is the hospital with the most denied medical claims?

So they can identify insights that they didn't have. Or for example, what patients could be treated for cancer and are not being treated. And this is a win-win-win for everyone because the best way to prevent cancer is to prevent it early. The hospital wins, the patient wins.

So it's a really like win-win-win case scenario when you can find these hidden opportunities in the data. And then we want to help them take action. So then we want to help them take action. Action comes from, for example, it's impossible to call all your chronic ill patients, your hypertension patients.

You can maybe call them at the same time to check on their levels, do follow-ups after surgery, do oncological follow-ups, also help them take action. So for institutions, we started with insights, but then we're going to go into actions. Totally. I love that because even doctors are human and they miss things in appointments and there are clinical guidelines that they might have wanted to follow, but they misheard something.

And so to have something that listens into an appointment live and catches potential errors or surfaces ideas to doctors, I think is incredible. Maybe you can tell us about how you think it could have helped your dad specifically, just to give us a patient example. For sure. So my father passed away at 58 with a very weird tumor in something that in Spanish is called lampolla de water, which basically connects the two intestines.

And he had hiccups for 10 days. And they could never understand his hiccups. Hiccups is under study in medicine. So he passed the past, the last three years of his life, reading papers like an animal.

I would arrive at my house at 3 a.m. and my father was reading papers. My father was trying to treat himself.

and he decided to treat himself. And in one of those treatments, there was a medication counterindication and that's how he passed away. So if my father would have had a second brain or some AI to interact and tell all the case, surface all the relevant medical literature, have all his medical history, so know that he was hypertense and other stuff. So that would have potentially saved him as a patient, having that second brain.

And I think as a doctor, he would have really valued the product because this is why doctors study medicine, to treat patients, not for the bureaucratic part of medicine, of documenting. And counterintuitively, these doctor errors are not doctor's fault. Being counterintuitively, the part is that being a primary care doctor can be harder sometimes than being a specialist because as a primary care doctor, you get all the spectrum of cases. So you get a headache, then you get a stomach pain, then you get an ankle injury.

So it's actually very hard to be a primary care doctor. So if you have a second brain that can help you in that wide spectrum, that would prevent medical errors, that will reduce preventable deaths. Totally. The number of people that die every year from medical errors is mind-boggling.

I'm forgetting this statistic, but it's like hundreds of thousands, right? Yes, no, it's like 43% of deaths are preventable in Latin America. So in Latin America, we have six people die per 1,000 people. Like that's the death rate.

And it ends up being like 4, 4.3 million deaths a year. And if you think about this, this is like 1.6 million of these could be preventable.

Nico, one of the most attractive characteristics of you as a founder is how mission-driven you are and the end goal of this company. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about some of the milestones that you want to achieve with telepathia. Yes, for sure. So our mission is to win the first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984 in Latin America.

We think this is possible with an AI doctor. If I go back a little bit to the education part, remember every kid with a tutor outperforms kids without a tutor by two standard deviations. The same thing could happen in medicine. If you give everybody a doctor and a nurse, you could outperform health outcomes by n standard deviations to the right.

And how do you win a Nobel Prize? You win it by two parts. You win it by discovery. You discover a new molecule.

You discover a new treatment. Or you win it by impact. We are more towards the impact. We think we could do interesting things in discovery with the genome code and all the data.

But we focus more on the impact. And what's our thesis there? Latin America is a growing region. People are getting older.

this product can go global and we can save approximately 5 million lives a year. If we save 5 million lives a year, that's more than penicillin and insulin combined. So that would be our shot at a Nobel Prize. Talk to us a little bit more about the Latin American market.

You mentioned the supply shortage of doctors, the unfortunate and preventable cases. What makes Latin American different and unique from the U.S. market in terms of being a healthcare company there?

There's a deep shortage of doctors and nurses. So there's like between 30 and 50% less than the developed economies in the OECD. And what's very specific about Latin America are like three main things. Number one, there's no electronic medical record with more than 5% market share.

So there's no interoperability between data. If you go to a consultation in X hospital and then to Y hospital, Y hospital literally can't know about your consultation. They have no way to know, even if the government tries to put laws on interoperability. but just that medical records don't speak to each other.

The technology doesn't exist. So one thing, it's making it easy to be interoperable. So that's one important part. Then the second part that is specific about Latin America is that regulation is friendlier.

And we work very closely with regulators, with Anvisa in Brazil, with Invima in Colombia, because it seems that regulation really, like necessity drives adoption and they know that an AI doctor is better than no doctor at all. Maybe an AI doctor is still not better than a Harvard or MD Anderson doctor, But then no doctor in a rural area of Latin America, it is better. So regulation has been very friendly to adopt new technologies. So that's a second important part of the region.

And the third important part of the region is that Latin America is a primary care healthcare economy, basically. The U.S. is a specialist healthcare economy where all doctors have to go into residence.

In Latin America, you have a lot of doctors that are primary care. Even in Latin America, medicine is an undergrad. So you just finish at 18 high school and you go into medicine. and at 22 you're seeing patients.

That's a very different story than it is here in the US. And remember that I was telling you that counterintuitively it can be harder to be a primary care doctor because you get all the spectrum of cases. So we want to prevent all those errors in the front line of care which again are not the doctor fault We just want to help them with a second brain on this So I think these three things like the lack of an electronic medical record with more than 5 which make integrations very important on a deep mode of the company Second, regulation being friendly to new entrants, to new technologies, because necessity drives adoption.

And third, being a region of primary care doctors. You mentioned Brazil and Colombia. Where was Telepatia started? How do you think about expanding across LATAM?

Yeah, for sure. So we always wanted to be a Pan Latam company, but the DNA, because the mission is to put an AI doctor in the 700 million lives of Latin America. We want to win a Nobel Prize in medicine. To do this, you need the impact of saving over 5 million lives a year.

So we always wanted to be Pan Latam. So actually one of the first clients were in Colombia where I was raised. I am gringo. People don't know, but I was born in Boston, but I grew up in Colombia.

So we started in Colombia. And then, but when I finished Stanford in July, 2025, I meet immediately to Brazil. Brazil is the largest economy of Latin America, the largest market, main priority for the company. So right now we operate in Colombia, Brazil.

We have some inbound interest from Mexico, Chile, Argentina as well. And we're starting to work with doctors and institutions of those countries, always like a Pan Latam DNA. Awesome. And are you building teams across each of those?

Where is the team? So right now we have two main headquarters. The first one is in Sao Paulo. That's where I live.

We actually got a house as an office. So it's with Casinha, they say in Portuguese. And we also have in Colombia the second operation. But the main HQ is in Sao Paulo.

Very cool. We've had a chance to get to know some of the team you've built and have just been so impressed by the people and the caliber of talent that you've recruited. Tell us a little bit about how you've built the team, why people are joining the mission. Yeah, you know, so remember at the beginning I said that no eight-year-old kid wants to work in e-commerce, that eight-year-old kids want to be doctors, astronauts.

This connection to the mission, I would say, has inspired a lot of people. And usually if you ask like the first 40 employees of Telepatia what it is today, they all have a connection to the mission. They lost a family member because of a healthcare disease or their partner is a doctor or their parents. There's always some type of connection to healthcare.

And they know that healthcare doesn't work. Healthcare today is a scarce resource. It doesn't work. And they want to help.

They want to make healthcare abundant. They want to impact healthcare because they see it broken. They've seen it from inside. So I think that connection to the mission is probably like variable number one and very important for us in that culture that we want to build as a company.

Actually, just funny, Telepatia is also a very healthy culture. So people center, HRV, resting heart rate and everything. So that's like an extra that you get. Second, it's been a very, because we want the Pan Latam DNA, it's been a very international team by design.

People that were living in France have moved back to Sao Paulo. I moved from Stanford to Sao Paulo. So we have doctors from MD Anderson, from Harvard that work with us. And so there's been like this international and Pan Latam DNA that there's no leading like nationality.

Like we're not Brazilian, we're not Colombian, we're Pan Latam, we're truly global. So that's also interesting. And these people usually connect a lot with the international component of the majority of the team. And number three, I would say just like funny, like talent stories.

We have three that are from here, very interesting. one. A doctor using telepatia found out like a treatment for a patient that extended like an oncological patient is a neuro-oncologist that extended the patient's life expectancy by like two years with the telepatia flag. And he reached out and joined telepatia.

He's part of the team of telepatia right now. That was very interesting. Then we have, we went to a verticalized player, the largest one in Brazil to pitch telepatia, the product to sell. And the person there leading the the strategy, join telepathia.

So we've had some very like- You're like, can you buy the product first and then join that? Yes, exactly. And then there's also some, as I was saying, like this connection to healthcare, you get like AI PhDs that are researching genomics. And usually AI PhDs are very driven by like natural curiosity.

And healthcare is something that produces natural curiosity in people. So this has been also like a very, like somebody that at one point of their life, maybe they didn't study medicine, but decided to research and go deep into a part of healthcare. And now they can truly like use their talents for healthcare. Before maybe they didn't have the company to do it because where were they going to work, right?

An AI PhD in Latin America is going to join a hospital. Probably not, right? So that's also been. Well, you've recruited some amazing people.

We're excited to continue to meet more. Totally. You know, you're building something special when people move continents to work with you. Yeah.

That's pretty rare. One thing we've thought a lot about in the space is obviously OpenAI and Anthropic or kind of rapidly building healthcare products. How do you think about Moat when it comes to your company and building something that's really defensible and well-sustained over time? For sure.

So I think like one, it's does every release of OpenAI and Tropic, does it improve your product or does it threading your product? For us, it keeps improving the product. And there's one thing that is very hard for any company to replicate and it's this integrations piece. Remember, there's no EMR with more than 5% market share in the region.

We've had to integrate with 22. And if you want to, like, there's horror stories in the integrations. You need to fly the team to a remote hospital in Brazil to sit with the IT team of the hospital because they don't even have APIs. So you need to build the APIs for them.

Or maybe you need to build RPAs. So we have a very strong motion of not only, like, forward-deployed engineers, which are becoming very common in the Valley, but of forward-deployed doctors as well. We call them FDDs. And these FDDs go into the institutions, understand the workloads of the doctors because it can be different.

Some do pre-charting, some don't. Templates, specialties, cardiology is very different than oncology. So all this team that deploys a hospital and a health system of not only engineers, but of doctors as well, is something that is very hard to replicate because it takes time. It takes energy and just, again, flying to Belo Horizonte in Brazil to integrate with the hospital, creating an API from scratch for that hospital.

So all this integration is part that we believe is going to make the company defensible. And all this integration, it produces very rich context to improve patient outcomes. And we should keep compounding on that context and improving patient outcomes for the institution. So if a hospital already integrated with telepatia, we're helping them make better decisions, find insights, we should keep compounding on that context and helping them even more and more and more.

And I think product velocity starts being very important. And telepatia is actually a story of that. Telepatia didn't start with just a scribe because we knew a scribe was probably going to be commoditized and easy to build So we know the scribe is like the trojan horse or the entry point to healthcare Every doctor would appreciate a note taker but you need to compound from them So we also help them with this clinician decision support, which is like live during the consultation or before the consultation, after the consultation.

We built the integration. We built this dashboard for the institutions. We want to help the institutions take action. So from this integration that is like level one, you then need to compound and have like high product velocity towards level two.

Nico, you're a repeat founder. Talk to us a little bit about the lessons that you have building your first company and what are some of those lessons that you're going to apply the second time around? For sure. So the first thing is the passion.

And I joke that no eight-year-old kid wants to work in e-commerce. Eight-year-old kids want to be doctors, astronauts. It's different. Like I read papers of medicine on the weekend.

I read papers at night. It's like my co-founder, a doctor, he sees a new paper and he sends it to me. And it's just fascinating to see everything that happens in medicine. And it's this part of, because medicine has been more an art than a science when it should be a science.

So there's so much science and research out there that isn't being productized. So we also want to like bridge that gap. So there's this passion to improve healthcare. My personal story, a family of doctors.

Like I sit at the dinner table at Christmas and it's my godmother, which is a doctor, my sister, which is a doctor. And they're asking about telepathia, very passionate. They didn't ask them much about the past company. It's like, oh, you were selling tomatoes.

It's not that interesting. So the passion just hits different on every angle. Number two, which I also think is very important, is in this one, I built a company with Thomas, my doctor, co-founder. I knew him all my life.

He knew my father. My father was a professor to him. He admired my father as a doctor. His father is a doctor.

So with someone that I think if you are alone, it can be a very lonely journey. And having someone that you deeply trust, admire, and it's very complimentary. So he's a doctor. I'm clearly not a doctor.

So we complement each other very well. And this works very well. I think that's something that was also different about this company. Like very complimentary skill sets and co-founders that knew each other forever.

And the third one, which is a little bit more capitalistic, but we are playing capitalism at the end of the day. it's just building a better business model. You know, building a better business. E-commerce margins are horrible.

So this one is truly a better business on an inflection point of technology, which the business keeps getting better and better. Awesome. We spoke a little bit about your end vision of the Nobel Prize. Talk us through how you get there, what comes next, and what comes along with the Nobel Prize.

Yes, for sure. So the Nobel Prize, you know, it's actually funny because my father in his office had Nobel Prize winners. So somebody like two weeks ago asked me, what does winning a Nobel Prize look like? And I'm like, it looks like appearing in the wall of my father, you know, being like a cuadro, a painting in the wall of my father.

So this is like the personal connection to it. I grew up in a very academic and scientific household where knowledge was power. I then learned a little bit sadly in life and with Game of Thrones that power is power. I'm not saying knowledge is power.

So there's a personal connection to this Nobel. and kind of like making my father proud. And I'll tell you exactly how together, but I competed a lot growing up with my father, like intellectually. And I remember I read once that you develop your brain until you're 25 years old.

So when I was 25, I was going to finally be smarter than my father. My mom used to tell me that. Really? Your frontal cortex isn't developed.

Yes, exactly. But when I was 25, my father passed away. So I could never know if I would beat him. I think he was better than me.

So I'll give it to him. So that's like the personal connection to the Nobel Prize and what it means, the science, the impact. It means that you're truly like with knowledge impacting the world in a positive way. And then like the specifics of how to get there.

My main hypothesis and like our main hypothesis is that with the context of the patient, we can do it. And what's a specialty where we can do it? In oncology. So if you think about an oncologist, an oncologist receives the patient at the end of the spectrum.

The patient already went to XYZ specialist. And even oncologists between them, they joke, no tissue, no issue. They get patients already diagnosed. They focus mainly on the treatment part of care.

And an oncologist has to keep up with medicine, unlike the proliferation of papers in oncology is very high, keeping up with the latest clinical trials and this. So in oncology, if you can, one, screen the population of patients to see what cancers could be treated earlier, right? Because the best way to treat cancer is to prevent it earlier. So you can screen the population for this.

Second, you can help oncologists effectively give the best treatment for that Y patient because you have all the clinical trials and everything. And number three, you can get even more specific into like personalized medicine and analyzing the patient's genetic code or genome and this into like creating the optimal treatment for every individualized patient. And this could reduce cancer mortality, let's say 5-10% in the region. And this would really be a shot at a Nobel Prize.

Another shot at a Nobel Prize is that if you prove that your impact is the same as like a drug. So again, insulin saved 1.5 million lives a year, penicillin 3 million lives a year. If with telepatia, you're saving $5 million, more than those two combined, that also gives you a shot at a Nobel Prize.

Amazing. Nico, thank you so much for coming on the show. We are honored to be working with you, and we're excited for this wild ride together. And to win the Nobel Prize.

And to Stockholm together, to eat the meatballs. You know, they eat a meatball soup when you win a Nobel Prize in Stockholm. We'll be there. We'll be ready.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Fantastic. Thank you.

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