Inno Under 25: Yunus Ansari of Roger

Editor's note: This year we honored some of the brightest young minds in the Bay Area innovation sector as part of our Inno Under 25 feature. Check out all the profiles from this year's honorees here.

Yunus Ansari left his home in the United Kingdom to come to Silicon Valley chasing the dream of becoming a startup entrepreneur. Before heading to the west coast he met the founding team for his startup Roger during his master’s program at Cornell University. Ansari says he took the fastest route he knew how to make it to the Bay Area’s startup scene, not having the luxury of being a local college dropout as a noncitizen. Now Ansari is attempting to bring the AI revolution to elder care to his startup Roger and has been inducted into the prestigious Berkeley Skydeck accelerator to fullfill his entrepreneurship dreams.

Yunus Ansari

How did you get into entrepreneurship?

Since I was young, I was always into entrepreneurship. I’ve never really had a proper job working for someone, I just wanted to pursue something myself and solve a big problem. Coming to the U.S. was the perfect thing to achieve that.

Did you know that you wanted to move out to the Bay Area?

Yeah. Even from when I was in the UK, I knew I wanted to be in Silicon Valley because that’s where the startups are.

What inspired you to start Roger?

We started with just really wanting to help elderly people because we saw in our own lives that they were struggling with technology. The idea was really different back then, but through a bunch of pivoting and coming to Skydeck and getting mentorship, we’re focusing now on real pain points we identified for those providing elder care and going B2B.

How does Roger work exactly? What’s your business model?

We’re focusing on home health agencies. So after elderly people come out of the hospital, they go into their homes, and these agencies send out nurses to the homes of these patients. There’s a huge staffing shortage and current staff are just consumed by manual work. So we’re automating a bunch of the manual work in home health — the documentation, the calls to these patients. We’re essentially building an operating system for these agencies and it’s all powered by large language models and AI to automate all the manual work.

Have these AI models made it easier to start a lean company?

Yeah, because the models are so accessible, I think it’s really easy to just get something off the ground. And I think there’s now potential for so many problems to be solved because of the models.

What are some milestones you have achieved as a company?

Just in the past few weeks, we’ve got a bunch of interests because we found the real top pain point and are pitching that to these agencies. We now have a 1,000-patient home health agency that we’re working with in the Bay Area. And we have a bunch of others that are interested with a 600-patient agency in the pipeline.

Are there any entrepreneurs that inspire you?

We’re really big fans of the guys at YC like Michael Seibel. We used to watch a bunch of YC videos and be inspired. The advice Michael gave us was really great, ignore the fluff and get straight to the point. And looking back in time, of course, everyone says people like Steve Jobs.