A startup from Harvard Innovation Labs is making its public debut.
Amber Nigam and Jie Sun, master’s degree students from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, have announced the launch of their new startup, basys.ai. The tech company uses its AI technology to predict and improve outcomes for patients with metabolic health diseases.
The startup is working with advisors like John Brooks III, former CEO and president at Joslin Diabetes Center and Insulet Corp. co-founder, and MIT professor Leo Anthony Celi, to bring its tech to patients, providers and payers.
Basys.ai went through several iterations before arriving at its current offerings, Nigam said. First, it provided doctors with data-science training. But Nigam said they realized this might not be hugely popular outside hubs of big data and health care such as Boston.
Data mining niche
Then, one year ago, the co-founders started looking at a bigger problem: Mining electronic health records to track and predict outcomes for patients with metabolic diseases. Nigam said it's found a niche helping improve treatment outcomes for patients, which is important to providers. On the payer side, the startup’s value proposition is automating the risk evaluation of patients and claims resolution.
“The long-term effect would be improving patient outcomes and giving them an idea of how they can ration their resources because they will already know the risk stratification of the patients,” Nigam said.
The startup wants to target a range of metabolic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases or chronic kidney diseases.
Nigam said basys.ai had signed a contract with one of the largest Boston hospitals, he declined to name the institution, and has received other inbound outreach from hospitals.
Bootstrapped
Sun, who has already completed her master’s in health data science, got the startup into the Launch Lab X GEO, an accelerator for Harvard alumni-led ventures. Nigam, a current student, gave the pair access to resources through Harvard Innovation Labs. Sun worked in data science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Mass General Hospital and Nigam is the former founder and CTO of edtech startup kydots.ai.
Basys.ai has a six-person team, Nigam said, and has been largely bootstrapped thus far with only about $250,000 in outside funding.
Nigam said they have filed a patent for their technology that predicts intervention strategies depending on the disease progression in individuals. The founders are now looking ahead to raising a seed round and reaching out to more payer organizations to scale the company.
The startup is also looking at pharma companies as potential future customers. Given that basys.ai works with electronic health records, Nigam said, it has information about how patients react with different drugs. Basys.ai could help pharma companies create more personalized drugs for patients, Nigam said.
