Serial entrepreneur Robbie Allen has a new startup – Bionic Health, a health care technology firm that has launched an “AI-powered health clinic” in Durham.
Bionic Health plans to leverage advanced AI technologies, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, and other machine-learning models to provide personalized care to its patients. And the Bionic Health clinic, which will deploy biomarkers, wearable data and other factors, will help personalize health plans for patients.
The startup launched with a $3 million raise.
Idea Fund Partners, an early investor in another Allen startup, Automated Insights, wrote the first check, Allen said. Other investors include Studio VC, Alumni Ventures, Scot Wingo's Tweener Fund – where Allen is a general partner – AI Operator’s Fund and Operator VC.
Health care isn’t a typical lane for Allen, who has traditionally been an AI-focused tech entrepreneur.
Allen said he was “trying to figure out what I was going to do for my next thing.” His “side gig” has been working with another serial entrepreneur, Wingo, on the Tweener Fund. But the entrepreneurial itch was strong.
“I was exploring a bunch of different things and really honed in on health care,” Allen said.
Allen's first startup, Automated Insights, centered on the use of AI’s natural language generation technology, and was sold to Vista Equity Partners-owned STATS in 2015. He followed that up by founding Infinia ML, which focused on bringing machine learning out of the laboratory and into the real world.
“I had been involved in other markets for so long it was easy to convince myself why not to do something,” he said.
His interest in the health care space has grown as he’s gotten older and seen first-hand the impact the industry can have. It’s also a completely different se up from anything he’s ever done. He describes his past companies as a “hammer looking for a nail.”
“I built technologies … that were really cool technologies, then our mission was to go out and find markets to apply them to,” he said. “This time I wanted to be in a market where, by default, there were lots of people already interested in it.”
All of this interesting stuff is happening in the space, “yet when I go to my primary care doctor every year, virtually none of that is accessible to me,” Allen said.
“There’s all this cool innovation going on in medical science and relatively little of it is going to the average person,” he said.
So Allen reached to Jared Pelo last year, and together, they founded Bionic Health.
Pelo, a medical doctor, founded iScribes, which was sold to Nuance Communications, which was sold to Microsoft. Together, they formed a dynamic duo of sorts, he said.
“I have the software and machine learning background – he’s got the health care and technology background,” Allen said.
Today, it’s a 10-person operation, including contractors, operating at the Frontier in RTP and a clinic near Southpoint. Allen said that in order to automate processes, it needed to be in the doctor-patient workflow – so the clinic is essential. Its patients will receive a highly personalized plan that will enable them to achieve optimal health using a variety of data sources such as individual genomics and body composition.
As for fundraising, Allen said he knew the investors already.
“The decision to invest in Bionic Health is a no-brainer,” Wingo said. “Robbie's on the short list of serial entrepreneurs that I'd back no matter what they are building. On top of that, what Robbie is building is super cool – I think of it as a doctor's AI assistant.”
Lister Delgado, managing partner at IDEA Fund Partners, said it was an easy check to write, as he’d known Allen and Pelo, for years.
“I love the concept Bionic Health represents,” Delgado said. "I think primary care and health care, in general, are poised for disruption and improvement. The fields are ready for better data and better analysis of that data to complement what physicians do.”