Underdog Founders - Andrej builds an AI that decides if you need surgery better than doctors.
Can a founder with no medical background build a healthtech startup?
Can AI decide if you need surgery better than doctors? It already does, thanks to Andrej.
Andrej grew up in a small village in Lithuania with one of the highest PhDs per capita.
Surrounded by big brain energy and with a nuclear scientist for a dad, he had a lot to live up to.
His sights landed on learning math from the best - Moscow State University.
He got in and graduated in the top 1%.
He stood out and got an interview at Morgan Stanley in London - despite barely scraping by with his English back then.
After eleven interviews in a row, Andrej got in. He totally thought he was a bigshot, only to realize the job was on training wheels.
Sitting in rooms discussing multi-billion dollar transactions was surreal, because he didn't know much about business.
He read all he could get his hands on, ready to take the training wheels off.
After hardcore math, economics and accounting are peanuts.
Andrej definitely wasn’t allergic, and ate all he could.
1 year later, he joins Apax Partners, a 50B PE firm with an open position in their tech investment team.
His main motivation was simple - keep learning.
Time passed, he moved up the ranks.
Unable to escape their mandatory MBA track, Andrej applied to Harvard Business School and reluctantly started his studies wishing he could be getting real work done.
Then the HBS community totally blew his expectations out of the park.
It was the first time he stopped seeing himself as a bigshot.
Armed with inspiration from his peers, HBS primed him for what was next.
As a trained mathematician, Andrej was always puzzled by the lack of hard data and statistics doctors use to make decisions - they essentially run on intuition.
When a surgeon told him he needed a spine fusion on his L4 and L5 vertebrae, he noticed the price tag - the conflict of interest was obvious.
Everyone in the industry knows a jaw-dropping 50% of these surgeries aren’t really needed.
Could he build an unbiased, purely data-driven model that always provides the best possible recommendation for patients?
More accurately than any doctor?
Without any medical training and zero startup experience?
Andrej decided to try, and Remedy Logic was born.
They started building a system that can read MRIs of your spine and form a recommendation.
Back in 2019, before the AI hype, VCs wouldn't touch this despite his CV.
Deep research, no paying clients, way too early.
Getting rejections slammed in his face over and over again wasn’t easy.
The runway was shrinking and all he had was 100 people wanting to “stay in touch”.
Founders are constantly time-starved: a quick no and clear feedback is a blessing from above.
One day, he gets emailed by a stranger who fell in love with his idea.
They met, he shot a couple of intros.
One of them was to Graham Brown from Lerer Hippeau.
The fit was promising.
Andrej challenged them to lead the deal or drop it altogether.
Remedy Logic got its lead investor, and the cold fundraising mountain turned to ice cream.
Today, Remedy Logic is integrated with 70 MRI facilities to interpret their spine studies automatically and generate radiology reports.
Spine surgeons use it to score the surgical fit of their patients and prioritize effectively.
RL now makes better surgery candidacy assessments than actual surgeons, as proven by peer-reviewed publications in leading medical journals.
AI can be scary, but it’s also unlocking impressive progress for the planet and our health.
Andrej is based in NYC and is hiring top sales talent.
If you know one, reach out to him on LinkedIn.
Underdog Founders 14 - Andrej Rusakov, CEO of Remedy Logic.
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