AI, Healthcare, and 700 Million Patients | Nicolas Abad, Telepatía

**Nicolás Abad** (0:00)
If you see health care software in Latam, I think your eyes would bleed. Latin America has a shortage of supply, there's 30% fewer doctors, there's 43% preventable deaths, there's 30% medical errors. My father passed away at 58 with a very weird tumor, which basically connects the two intestines, and he had hiccups for 10 days. If my father would have had a second brain or some AI to interact, that would have potentially saved him as a patient, and that's what we're trying to build.

**Daisy Wolf** (0:24)
You know, you're building something special when people move continents to work with you. That's pretty rare.

**Nicolás Abad** (0:29)
A doctor using Telepatía found out a treatment for a patient that extended a patient's life expectancy by like two years. He reached out and joined Telepatía. Our mission is to win the first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984 in Latin America. We think this is possible with an AI doctor. This product can go global, and we can save approximately 5 million lives a year. That's more than penicillin and insulin combined.

**Eva Steinman** (0:50)
Health care is fundamentally a supply and demand problem. Patients need care, but doctors, nurses, and health care systems have limited time and resources. In many parts of Latin America, those constraints are even more acute, with physician shortages, fragmented medical records, and limited health care infrastructure. Nicolas Abad believes AI can help close that gap. After losing his father to a preventable medical error, Nico became focused on improving health care outcomes through technology. Today, his company Telepatía is building tools designed to help physicians make better decisions, reduce administrative burden, and improve access to care across the region.
Gabriel Vazquez, Daisy Wolf, and Eva Steinman speak with Nico about health care, AI, and building for one of the world's largest underserved markets.

**Gabriel Vasquez** (1:44)
Telepatía is building an AI doctor for Latin America, a region over 700 million people with a massive doctor shortage and almost no software in its hospitals. Nicolás Abad is the CEO and founder of Telepatía. He started Telepatía while he was at Stanford, and since then raised the $9 million seed and moved to Sao Paulo to build this out. Telepatía now has thousands of doctors across the entire region.
Nico, I'm really glad that you're here. I'm dialing in today, so Daisy and Eva will take it from here, but I'll jump as we go.

**Daisy Wolf** (2:13)
Nico, we first met in 2022
You had just shut down your first company and you were thinking about something more meaningful to do in your next chapter. Tell us the story of how you came to start this company and what it means to you.

**Nicolás Abad** (2:33)
For sure. So actually, Daisy, we met after an intense week and days in my life where I lost my father, my company and my girlfriend at that time. And my father, so end of 2022, my father passed away early, 58 years old with a preventable death. My father a doctor, my sister a doctor, my grandfather a doctor, my godmother a doctor.
And when this happened, I just became obsessed with health and health care. And I wanted to dedicate my life to it. And actually, I reached out to Gabriel Vasquez, knowing you guys had a health care fund, to talk about health care because I wanted to dedicate my life to this. I then went to Stanford two years to try to understand health care, which health care is a very complex market. As we all know, it has a lot of actors, it has payers, providers, pharma, patients, doctors, nurses. But at the end of the day, there's always a supply and demand of care. Basically, the patients demand care and the doctors and nurses supply care to those patients. What happened is that demand is infinite. Health care is a universal right in Latin America, and there could even be more demand. In education, there's something called the Bloom problem, where every kid with a tutor shifts academic outcomes to standard deviations to the right. The same thing could happen in health care. If you gave everybody a doctor and a nurse, you could shift health outcomes and standard deviations to the right. But supply is finite. There's a finite amount of doctors and nurses. And if you double click a little bit on the supply, you see that Latin America has a shortage of supply.
There's 30 percent fewer doctors and 50 percent fewer nurses per capita than the developed countries. There's also a quality problem where there's 43 percent preventable deaths, there's 30 percent medical errors. And there's a productivity problem where doctors and nurses spend between 40 and 70 percent of their time on things that are not equal to patient care. So what the region needs is way more doctors, but way better ones and way more efficient ones. And that's what we're trying to build. We're building AI doctors for doctors, built by doctors. And the first product is the product that would have saved my father as a patient and that he would have loved as a doctor. My father's nickname was Telepatía, and that company is in his honor. And going back a little bit to my past company and mentioning the pension, it's interesting because I always joke a little now that no eight-year-old kid wants to go into e-commerce. Eight-year-old kids want to be doctors, astronauts. And this is a company of my life. This is what we're going to build. We want to win a Nobel Prize in medicine, the first one in Latin America since 1984