Carolyn Lam and her husband James Hare co-founded Us2.ai to help doctors diagnose heart disease using AI
The Ready For Launch series asks questions of entrepreneurs to get the inside story behind a new startup or product launch.
It was around three years ago when Gen.T honouree Carolyn Lam and her husband James Hare landed on the idea to use machine learning to automate the analysis of echocardiograms, or ultrasound images of the heart. The idea was sparked when Hare went for a routine checkup on his heart and ended up receiving two opposing prognoses—one good, the other not so good.
Thankfully, the final result concluded that his heart was healthy, but it opened his eyes to an efficiency gap. The entrepreneur and investor in tech startups saw a business opportunity in making the diagnosis of heart conditions easier and more accessible to all doctors—not just sonographers and cardiologists—using AI.
Armed with this idea, he approached Lam, who is a renowned cardiologist at the National Heart Centre of Singapore, and two others: Yoran Hummel, a cardiovascular researcher specialising in echocardiography, diastology and cardio-mechanics, and Paul Seekings, who was CTO at IoT solutions company Embodied Sensing. In August 2017, they established Eko.ai and started developing an AI diagnostic software.
This past January, the startup secured seed funding from Sequoia India and Singapore-based EDBI. Its software is still in the regulatory approval process, but Lam says they expect to obtain the first green light in early 2021. More recently, in September, the startup was rebranded as Us2.ai. Here, we find out more from Lam and Hare about their vision for the startup.
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Can you introduce Us2.ai in one sentence?
Carolyn Lam Us2.ai is on a mission to automate the fight against heart disease by using AI to fully automate the ultrasound screening procedure of the heart, which is the safest and most commonly used tool to image the heart. We’re taking a process that usually takes 30 minutes, 250 manual clicks and has less than 20 percent variability and reducing it to two minutes and one click, with zero variability.
Who is the target consumer?
Lam The medical community to start off. In other words, doctors like myself, to make us more efficient and accurate. Eventually, we want to bring our software to everyone as a way of putting heart health into one’s own hands—similar to the way AI has democratised electrography from a specialist’s tool to a feature on one’s watch!
What is your value proposition?
Lam We offer users higher productivity and greater accuracy and are enabling AI-based ultrasound technology for people like us too.
What is the size of the potential market?
James Hare Our products address cardiovascular diagnostics, research and predictive analytics, which together target multi-billion-dollar markets.
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