While many of us have only recently gotten excited about the capabilities of artificial intelligence, Ganesh Padmanabhan has been exploring AI for years through his work with several Austin startups.
After his early engineering and product roles at Intel and Dell, Padmanabhan became the head of global business development and marketing at CognitiveScale, an AI engineering startup that went on to raise $40 million. Then he co-founded data virtualization startup Molecula, where he was chief revenue officer until 2020.
But it wasn’t just a knack for AI products that led Padmanabhan to his next venture. He tapped into his experiences with friends, family and colleagues who either worked in or had been a patient in the health care system. He saw major opportunities to improve the experience, help doctors more quickly match patients with potentially life-saving treatments and apply new capabilities being unlocked by continuously evolving AI models.
In more technical terms, he saw a lot of unstructured data that needed human-level reasoning to make decisions.
"I have had several friends and family members go through critical and chronic care treatments and have seen the issue of not all of the deep, dark data being used to make decisions by health care professionals," he said.
After working mostly in stealth mode, CEO Padmanabhan and co-founder Kris Nair, former deputy chief information officer at Transamerica, on May 2 announced their new startup, Autonomize Inc., has raised $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Asset Management Ventures and included money from ATX Venture Partners, Loop Ventures and The Next Practices Group.
By the time he went out to raise a seed round, Padmanabhan said the company had already locked in several early customers, leading venture firms to think of it as more of series A-stage startup than one just raising a seed round.
The startup currently employs 15 and operates as a remote-first company. Beyond Austin, it has team members in Florida, California and India.
Meanwhile, Autonomize has released several AI products.
One of its first, called Pixel, can more quickly vet patients who may be eligible for potentially life-saving treatments through clinical trials. Padmanabhan told the story of a woman who had triple-negative breast cancer and initially failed to get into an immunotherapy trial for a drug called Keytruda that could have cured her, because vital information about a protein expression wasn't easily accessible to a researcher.
The woman had to go through aggressive traditional treatment, he recounted. The drug went on to get approved by the FDA. On a later recurrence of cancer, her records showed the required protein expression that made her eligible for this modern treatment. After treatment, she is now in remission from her cancer, Padmanabhan said — but the woman could have had a much different outcome if she been treated with that drug earlier.
Automize has also launched a product called Wizard that helps doctors with clinical decisions by generating deeper chart-based insights. And the company’s generative AI product is a conversational search and summarization platform that can be trained on secure internal data and client-based contextualization, which can assist health care organizations with scheduling and other customer-facing queries.
One of Automize's early customers is a fellow Austin startup called SubjectWell, which has an audience engagement platform to raise awareness of clinical research in the general population and give patients access to new treatments.
"We evaluated several vendors building vertical solutions for patient matching and medical records review, but they offered limited solutions," SubjectWell Chief Operating Officer Ivor Clarke stated. "Almost no existing platform consumes unstructured data and serves multiple contextual use cases. Autonomize AI has added tremendous value to SubjectWell in a short period of time by making our medical records review for clinical trials 10 times more efficient and accurate."
