Building a successful go-to-market strategy for deep tech in healthcare isn’t just challenging—it requires completely rewriting the standard startup playbook. In a recent Category Visionaries interview, Corti CEO Andreas Cleve shared insights from scaling their AI platform from $800K to 300% year-over-year growth. Here are the key lessons for founders selling complex technology into regulated markets.
1. Solve System-Level Problems, Not Individual Pain Points
Most healthcare AI companies target individual practitioners. Corti took a different approach. As Andreas explains: “If you’re a single player, GP, physician, clinician, and you want really great dictations like speaking to a device that then puts out text, I think you have probes of opportunities to find that from many great companies.”
Instead, Corti targets system-wide challenges: “Where we help is if you’re that system and you have somebody like a medical director who owns the risk that’s going on in, let’s say, 100,000 phone calls or video calls every year.”
2. Turn Regulatory Compliance into Competitive Advantage
While many startups view regulations as obstacles, Corti transformed them into assets. “Today it’s something that we think about as a competitive advantage or at least edge,” Andreas notes. “And it’s something we know that we need to navigate with the most delicacy and focus.”
This approach has helped them win major contracts, including “all of Sweden’s medical emergency hotlines. Massive responsibility we’re really proud of.”
3. Design Your Sales Cycle Around Trust-Building
Healthcare sales cycles are notoriously long, but Corti embraces this reality: “Maybe there’s fantastic overnight success building Roblox ad platforms, but in our line of work, if you really want to have a deep impact on these patient providers, pay providers, then it just takes a ton of time and trust is something you build over that time.”
Their typical timelines:
- 6-8 months for relationship building and deal signing
- Up to 9 months for implementation
- European government deals: up to one year end-to-end
- Fastest deals: 90 days from start to finish
4. Align Your Pricing with Customer Operations
Corti’s pricing model reflects deep understanding of healthcare operations. “If you want Corti, you add Corti. Like you pay an employee, you pay us per consultation, we join and you pay us the more you want us to do in that consultation,” Andreas explains.
This approach allows customers to:
- Start with basic features
- Scale usage based on needs
- Pay proportionally to value received
5. Solve the Impossible Trade-Off
The key to Corti’s rapid growth has been solving healthcare’s central dilemma. As Andreas observes: “The majority of tools out there today has at least a little bit of either a direct or indirect trade off… yeah, you can automate your, let’s say ICD coding, but you don’t know what kind of impact that will have on the clinicians.”
Instead, Corti positions itself as the solution for sophisticated providers who “want not just to automate or cut cost, but you also want to do it while improving care. And that is a dichotomy for most providers.”
The Impact-Driven Growth Strategy
What makes these lessons particularly valuable is their results. Corti has grown from $800K ARR in their first year to 300% growth last year, with projected growth exceeding 200% this year. Even more importantly, they’ve achieved this while maintaining focus on patient impact.
As Andreas emphasizes: “When they tell their story about why it made sense to join us, they can always tell a story about how a patient got impacted. And that just rocks my world every time I hear it.”
This combination—rapid growth and meaningful impact—offers a powerful template for other deep tech founders, particularly in healthcare and other regulated industries. It shows that you don’t have to choose between building a high-growth business and making a real difference. With the right go-to-market strategy, you can achieve both.
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