Interviewee
Tanay Tandon, Co-Founder & CEO of Athelas, a startup building life-changing healthcare products to people around the globe. The company maximizes reimbursements, and delivers actionable insights into the financial health of your practice.
Transcript
Tanay Tandon: We build software and sensor technology for transitioning healthcare into the home and also helping doctors digitize their workflows and automate a lot of the work that they do today in a traditional healthcare practice. And so we started the company six years ago and originally the, you know, the business looked quite different. It was very focused on taking a specific technology, computer vision and, and microfluids and applying it to do what's called a CBC or complete blood count from a patient's home from a very small volume of blood. So our core initial technology was essentially, you know, taking some of the most commonly ordered blood tests for a patient who might be suffering from cancer or an autoimmune disease or maybe has an infection or just received surgery. In those cases, you want to track a patient on an ongoing basis and see fluctuations or changes in their white blood cell counts, their platelets, their red blood cells, etcetera. And so when we started the company, we had a prototype of a device.
It was literally built in my dorm room at Stanford. And then we hacked it in Deepika, my co-founder's garage. And, then we actually ran our very first clinical trial in Mexico. And it was a small, you know, small hospital. Our, you know, one of our early founding team members, peta Peter Navarro, she helped set up the trial and got everything running there. And essentially like one, one quick story, I love telling it to people, because it really summarizes why we built the fellows During that first trial, we helped identify a case of leukemia that had not been detected before. It was a very serious blood cancer.
Our device basically took a bunch of images of blood, of the blood sample and quickly saw there were 30 or 40,000 white blood cells per microliter, which is way higher than normal. Normally patients have between five to 10,000 white blood cells per microliter. And so immediately we knew something was wrong, we flagged it to the nurses and then three weeks later after they did their normal tests, they confirmed that it indeed was leukemia. And I think that's that moment for us is when we decided, okay, we're gonna drop out of school, we're gonna go full time on the company. There's just so many problems to solve in healthcare. Everything from diagnostics to the software, how the data was, you know, moved around in the health system. And a lot of those ideas are, are really important parts of, of what the core's product is today. But yeah, I'll, I'll stop there. But we, I think, I think the spirit of the business is very much the same. How do we help patients using advances in software and devices?
Elisa Muñoz: So I have to ask about the challenges. You were a kid back then.. So how was your first pitch with investors? Did they take you seriously?
Tanay Tandon: Yeah, I think it's interesting. One, one of the beauties of, of the valley is that if you come with data and you come with technology and you come with hardcore evidence, people at the end of the day, you know, they, they bet on ideas and they bet on people here and, and they don't necessarily bet on, you know, pedigree or you know how old you are, which is, which is really helpful. And I think one other point was when we started the business there was, you know, a lot of noise in the blood diagnostic space and at the time we were solely a blood diagnostics company. And so we had to fight through a lot of that noise and, and I think the way we did it was just be hyper transparent is, you know, share our clinical trial results, share how the technology worked.
And I actually think the core technology behind our first device is very simple. You know, it uses the technique that's been used for hundreds of years, microscopy and counting cells, which has been used for over a hundred years is a gold standard in pathology. So overall, I think the way that we counted a lot of the challenges associated with our experience just came down to being super upfront about the data and being really focused on the technology.
That was the moment for us when we decided, “Okay, we're gonna drop out of school, we're gonna go full time on the company. There's just so many problems to solve in healthcare”.
Elisa Muñoz: How hard was it to educate people with the concept of “The future of healthcare can be at home”?
Tanay Tandon: Definitely. I think the biggest challenges were I, I'd, I divided into two or three core kinds of stages. The first stage was proving to the FDA that this technology was safe and it was effective. And so it was entirely clinical trials and we spent the first two years of the business entirely on that. From there, once we launched, I think the uptake in the patient community and the doctor community was very natural and it didn't take a lot of convincing cuz we would, you know, someone on our sales team would just demo the device and immediately for a patient that was chronically ill and currently going into a lab for a venous blood test every single week, we were able to replace a subset of their tests there and then, and so it, you know, immediately caught fire in a very specific population. I think the, the challenges that came after were actually not related to the diagnostic and the device itself, but rather how do we, how do we solve all the auxiliary problems and, and, and all of the, you know, other problems that doctors are having, how do we expand our, our product in a way that truly solves all of the problems that a doctor has?
And so a feedback we keep getting from our customers and, and we listen to our customers every week, we meet with them every week was, look, this device is really useful for monitoring maybe a percent or 2% of my patients, but I also have patients that have cardiac problems or patients that have diabetes or patients that have other chronic disease and we need tools to help monitor those populations. And so the very next step was great. We launched a bunch of other devices, some we labeled, some we built ourselves and expanded into this larger suite of sensors. And I think the big learning for us there was, you know, the more you listen to your customers, the more time you spend with them, the better. It's a very, very high leverage piece of time.
And then I'd say the next phase in, in where the company is now is transitioning in into building more and more software tools for these customers around all of the operations that happens after you see a patient billing, you know, billing software, submitting insurance claims, collecting revenue, doing prior-auths, scheduling appointments. There's so much work that a doctor does manually today that gets in the way of them seeing a patient efficiently. And, and I, again, I think it was the same theme of talking to the customer, spotting their problems, shipping a solution, and then seeing if it sticks.
Elisa Muñoz: How did you come up with this idea of building support instead of just focusing on the healthcare problems?
Tanay Tandon: Yeah, I think, I think it was, it was a very interesting decision internally because I think there's a big business to build exclusively just doing sensors and diagnostics, which is one path we could have taken. I think the fact that we, we, we were very methodical in, in what the core problems were for our, for our customers. And at the end of the day, our mission is the same. We wanna transition healthcare into the home and we wanna make it much more preventative. And I think the way to do that is a combination of diagnostics and software. And the core pain point that we heard from our doctors in terms of what was the burning need that they had today all came down to the fact that their billing tools were broken and that their workflow tools internally were broken.
And what we started seeing is we would launch our devices across maybe a couple hundred patients in a practice and immediately the doctor would have so much trouble keeping up with the submission of claims or keeping up with the, you know, scheduling or tracking of the results. And their current tools weren't built for preventative healthcare and they weren't built for in-home healthcare. And we realized that we have to build those tools and that's how we expanded into billing into, into all of the other operational software that our practice needs as well.
Elisa Muñoz: Are you planning to expand soon? Are you planning to launch new products? What do you think are the next steps for Athelas?
Tanay Tandon: Yeah, I mean, so today we're, you know, about like three 50 people globally, so it's a much larger team now and the, the, the, the rate of we've onboarded more customers and, you know, more, more volume in the last quarter than like the last three or four quarters combined. And so our pace of growth is also quickening. And as a result, you know, we think that there's, there's a lot of interesting applications we're seeing of large language models and artificial intelligence in continuing to automate a lot of the workflows these doctors have as well as a bunch of new sensors. So we have tests like platelets and hemoglobin and in-home medication adherence that we hope to launch this year as well or in the coming quarters. And then, you know, I, I think for us it's, it's about those boring, incremental daily work of how do you make a doctor's job a percent easier, easier every single day. And that's really what our product suite looks like.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or people starting on these healthcare paths?
Tanay Tandon: Our biggest learning has probably been that, you know, to build anything of significance for a long time. This was, you know, there were many times I think during the process where the first two years it would've, it might have made more sense to quit because of how hard that FDA clearance was in that initial stage. And then after that, every startup I think goes through like high growth stages and plateaus and then things that they, you know, where they figure out a new unlock. And, and I think for the, the, the best companies are the ones that learn how to compound year over year.
And even when things are not perfect, they're willing to put their head down and do the work. And so for me, you know, the, the biggest learning is that in the last six years there have been so many trends and flashes and, you know, you had the crypto swing and you had like, you know, covid and you had, you know, all kinds of industries came and went. But the fact that we are stuck with a problem, I think, is what has set us apart and hopefully will continue to set us apart. So my, my biggest advice to folks is pick a problem that you're willing to work on for 10 plus years and then just don't quit and you'll probably end up winning.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you so much. That was inspiring!
Tanay Tandon: Of course, thanks for having me, Elisa.
