Jive co-founder Bill Lynch is back with a new startup exploring the use of artificial intelligence tools, specifically generative AI, in health care.
The new company is called HumanTrue and Lynch is chief technology officer. He is working with CEO Joan Severson, who is a college friend and also an exited founder. Severson co-founded the digital agency Digital Artefacts in 2000 and sold it to Clinical Ink, a clinical trial data and technology company, in 2021.
After Iowa-based Digital Artefacts sold, Lynch helped with some projects and got acquainted with the world of clinical trials, the software available and the challenges, he said.
Then generative AI exploded onto the scene.
“This is a similar tech transformation we saw with the internet,” said Lynch, who is now based in Bend. “In June we founded the company to have a place to put some money and explore (the possibilities).”
The duo have hired three former Jivers to build a tool that helps translate clinical trial protocols into layperson language, he said. The idea is the tool could make it easier for patients to find trials and share them with their doctor.
But, Lynch notes the company is firmly in the demo phase of development. As the team builds and gains feedback the market or the tool could change. What the final product might be hasn’t been determined yet.
“We’re in the phase of trying to build something that looks good and functions,” he said.
The team is building its own large language model to power whatever the final tool will be. The government maintains a database of all clinical trials since the mid-1990s, Lynch said and that provides 500,000 records that are used to train the model. The team is experimenting with different sets of information and coaching it on the output and enhancing its vocabulary.
“(We’ve) seen good results so far,” he said, adding that he could imagine the final product might be a service or a platform.
The team did some early prototyping using OpenAI's technology but is now transitioning to its own models based on the open source Llama 2 models from Meta.
Lynch said Severson has the connections to the market from her previous company’s role collecting data for clinical trials. He has connections to talented engineers and designers who have experience building tools that take the experience of consumer software and apply it to business applications.
Jive rose to prominence with its business communication tool that brought social media-like aspects to internal company and employee communications. Jive went public in 2011. Lynch left in 2013. He went on to mentor startups as an entrepreneur-in-residence for what is now called Prosper Portland and then spent more than a year as vice president of product for fast-growing Portland startup Cloudability.
HumanTrue is being funded by Lynch and Severson. He isn’t ruling out investors eventually, but it will all depend on the opportunity the team finds.
“(Fundraising) is not something we say we have to do,” he said.
