Northwestern Mutual announced that artificial intelligence company Pythonic AI has won its second "Reverse Pitch MKE" event, earning the young startup a seed investment of up to $85,000 as the takeaway prize.
The financial services company says more than 16 teams submitted their ideas. In March, seven finalists were invited to pitch their business concepts to Northwestern Mutual executives for the Reverse Pitch event at the company’s downtown Milwaukee headquarters.
Northwestern Mutual says it was Pythonic’s creative solution in the medical records space that propelled the startup to the top.
For Pythonic co-founders Matt Younkle and Baoqiang Cao, the win accelerated a company still tinkering in the exploration stage. Just a year prior, Younkle and Cao were trying to figure out the best way to automate the medical records process in an industry that still heavily relied upon people to manually review records.
The pair say they knew it wasn’t a matter of if automation would happen, it was a matter of when. They wanted to try their hand at tackling the problem with technology.
“The problem is [the medical review process] could be hundreds of pages of PDF files — it is really tedious and overwhelming,” said Cao. “These companies have to hire people, and train them to specialize in reading these documents. We thought we could apply machine learning to speed up the process.”
Younkle says he saw Northwestern Mutual’s call for entrepreneurs in his email inbox, and decided to put boots to ground. Using open source AI tools, the team went to work to build a product that could solve a problem that was two-fold: First, the technology had to be able to scan or read PDF files, and second, it had to recognize natural language sophisticated enough to accurately interpret the data. Now, they’re looking to take their concept to a product launch.
Throughout the pitch process, Younkle and Bao say Northwestern Mutual remained a source of expertise and support.
“We took every chance to understand the needs and the challenges” put forth by Northwestern Mutual subject matter experts, Younkle said.
“Based on that, and on the medical coding space, it was a matter of writing up the proposal, and the pitch, and mocking up some interfaces to demonstrate what we’d be interested in doing," he added.
The pair say they were pleasantly surprised by their win. While the company would have continued to pursue their idea to automate medical records, Younkle says their approach — and their first customer — would have looked vastly different. The Reverse Pitch helped Pythonic AI bring medical review challenges to light, he adds.
In addition to the seed investment, Pythonic AI will continue to receive access to corporate mentors and networks through Northwestern Mutual, and receive working space at Cream City Labs, the company’s on-site innovation lab.
In 2017, Northwestern Mutual executives selected Socialeads as its first ‘Reverse Pitch MKE’ winner. The platform analyzes social networks to keep financial advisors up-to-date on client milestones.
