5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Corti AI’s Enterprise Healthcare Journey

When most founders view regulations as roadblocks, some see opportunities. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andreas Cleve from Corti AI shared how his team turned healthcare’s notorious complexity into a competitive advantage, growing 300% last year while landing government-scale contracts.

Here are five crucial go-to-market lessons from their journey:

1. Turn Regulatory Constraints into Competitive Moats

While many startups try to circumvent regulations, Corti embraced them. As Andreas explains, “A lot of entrepreneurs have just looked at regulation sort of as this weird bump on the road, something to just get passed. Today it’s something that we think about as a competitive advantage or at least edge.”

This mindset shift transformed their entire go-to-market strategy. Instead of viewing compliance as a cost center, they made it central to their value proposition, particularly when selling to enterprise healthcare systems that prioritize risk management.

2. Challenge Industry Assumptions About Technology

Rather than accepting conventional wisdom about healthcare software, Corti questioned fundamental assumptions. Andreas notes, “The majority of big vendors today, only the majority of important workflows with clinicians, they actually build from a premise I don’t think they challenge enough, which is we need to get people back to a computer to do work.”

This contrarian view led them to develop ambient AI technology that works alongside healthcare providers rather than demanding their attention, creating a distinctive market position.

3. Build Trust Through Deliberate Sales Cycles

In an era obsessed with growth at all costs, Corti takes the long view. “A government deal in Europe can take up to a year end to end,” Andreas shares. Rather than trying to compress these cycles, they use the time to build deeper relationships and prove their value.

This patience has paid off. They’ve secured contracts with entire national healthcare systems, including “all of Sweden’s medical emergency hotlines.” These relationships, once established, create powerful references for future sales.

4. Position Around Outcomes, Not Just Efficiency

While many healthcare tech companies lead with cost savings, Corti focuses on care quality. Andreas explains: “The best paya providers in the world will not just want to cut off 5% of some kind of cost base if they cannot know for certain then it leads to better or ad part quality of care because that’s ultimately the promise that brand makes.”

This positioning resonates particularly well with healthcare brands that need to maintain quality while improving efficiency. It also helps justify longer sales cycles and higher price points.

5. Find Early Adopters in Conservative Markets

When Corti started in 2016, “The majority of people was really scared about sort of the Big Brother Hollywood kind of way of thinking about it,” Andreas recalls. “Nobody wanted ambient AI in a clinic listening and it felt super Big Brother.”

Instead of pivoting to an easier market, they focused on finding the few forward-thinking organizations ready to embrace their vision. This patience allowed them to build reference customers while the market caught up to their vision.

The through-line in all these lessons is a willingness to embrace what other startups try to avoid. While many founders in regulated industries dream of disrupting the status quo overnight, Corti shows how working within constraints can create lasting advantages.

As Andreas puts it, “Trust is something you build over that time… getting it into healthcare, past regulatory bodies and all that jazz, will take what a lot of young entrepreneurs will feel like very old world kind of moves that are there not to slow you down, but to prove you’re worth it.”

For founders building in regulated markets, the message is clear: Sometimes the longest path is the shortest distance to sustainable growth. By embracing complexity rather than fighting it, you can build competitive advantages that are hard to replicate.