Alex Zekoff decided to launch chatbot startup Thoughtful Automation Inc. about a month before the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. That meant his new company's work environment almost automatically became remote and flexible.
Zekoff, along with co-founder Dan Parsons, decided Chicago would be a great home base to grow the business and attract tech talent. And that was the case for a couple of years as the company refined its bot-building capabilities for a wide variety of applications.
Then, a couple of years ago, OpenAI launched its GPT large language models, which provided a new opportunity to supercharge Thoughtful's relatively simple chatbots with decision-making capabilities and human-like conversational interfaces. Thoughtful now has a suite of AI agents that automate a variety of revenue-cycle management tasks to help mid-market health care providers — ranging from outpatient surgery to dental offices — save money.
And as the startup focused on health care, the founders decided that Chicago might not be their longterm headquarters.
"We just found that it wasn't as friendly of an environment for us and our business to scale," Zekoff said. "So we made a strategic decision about 18 months ago to move to Austin, start an office and really start scaling headcount out of there — and we really loved it. I would definitely see plans to stay there for a long time as we build the team in the U.S."
Thoughtful recently set up its Austin headquarters at Industrious, a co-working space at 823 Congress Ave. downtown. It currently has four employees there. It plans to hire about 15 more people in Austin in the next 18 months. Overall, the company has 22 U.S. employees and 45 additional workers spread out remotely.
While the Austin office is focused on sales and customer service, Thoughtful also is looking to hire engineers in Austin or remotely. It currently has eight open positions on its website, including sales, marketing and engineering roles. Zekoff is currently living in Florida but travels to Austin several times each month. The startup also has all of its employees come together on a quarterly basis for in-person meetings and team building.
"We'll likely plan on raising a series B financing. We've been growing around 3.5 (times), or 250%, year-over-year for the last three years," he said. "So we're just trying to catch up with demand right now for health care and specifically health care AI. We've seen a big surge as the conversations have gone to AI in the last couple of years."
Meanwhile, in April, the startup secured a $12.5 million series A led by Ohio-based Drive Capital, which will be formally announced in June. That brings its total funding to $28.3 million.
AI is white-hot right now and attracting billions in investment. But Zekoff, a former senior consultant at Deloitte Consulting, said Thoughtful's primary competition comes from outsourcing providers that help U.S. health care businesses shift back-office administration to remote teams, typically based overseas.
"We basically can mimic what a human is doing 100%. So you, as a provider, can hire an eligibility verification employee to go out to insurance verification portals, and you would need five to 10 people to do that," he said. "Or do you hire Ava — which is what we call the AI agent, eligibility verification AI — to go do that work? But you only need one Ava. And you never need to retrain it and it gets better over time. And that is the secret here of what we're doing. We're installing these agents that are helping improve the cash cycles and outcomes by eight to 10 (times)."
