A psychiatric patient’s attack on a healthcare worker in 1986 wouldn’t seem like the catalyst for an AI healthcare company. But for Corti CEO Andreas Cleve, watching his mother rebuild her life after that incident planted the seeds for a revolution in patient care technology.
The Personal Cost of Healthcare Gaps
“She ended up spending most of my childhood in rehab, rebuilding her brain centers and many of her capabilities,” Andreas recalls of his mother’s journey. Those formative years exposed him to healthcare’s most intimate challenges: “It just means a lot—the experience you’re having, the doctors you’re meeting, how the information was relayed, how you sleep at night based on how that information was given.”
This personal connection to healthcare’s impact isn’t unique among healthcare entrepreneurs. As Andreas notes, “Everybody I usually meet who ends up gravitating towards healthcare ends up having these kind of story like mine.”
A Winding Path to Innovation
Before founding Corti, Andreas’s journey took several unexpected turns. A promising soccer career ended with a motorcycle accident at 17: “I broke my leg in eight places. So my soccer career was gone.” Initially drawn to banking because “bankers had a blast,” his path eventually led him to technology through an early e-commerce venture.
His first healthcare startup, Ovivo, emerged in 2010 with a then-radical idea: using chatbots for healthcare staffing. “Back then you didn’t have bring your own device. Everybody didn’t have smartphones,” Andreas explains. “So us coming there saying, ‘hey, we’re going to text you, like a robot’s going to text,’ our system’s going to text you… that was weird for them.”
The Genesis of Corti
By 2016, Andreas had learned crucial lessons about healthcare technology. “The majority of big vendors today owning 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,” he explains.
This insight led to Corti’s founding vision: creating “deflationary, almost invisible technology that will allow a clinician not just to get technology out of the way, but feel augmented or have more agency with patients to do more.”
Building Trust in a Skeptical Market
The early days weren’t easy. “When we started building that in 2016 and went around talking to people about the opportunity of like AI and listening AI, the majority of people was really scared about sort of the big brother Hollywood kind of way of thinking about it and nobody wanted ambient AI in clinic listening,” Andreas recalls.
This resistance taught them a crucial lesson about deep tech innovation: “If you want to be market defining and deep tech… you need to search for those early adopters that believe who you believe and there were very few.”
From Vision to Reality
Rather than chase quick wins, Corti took a methodical approach to building trust. “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,” Andreas emphasizes.
This patient approach has paid off. Since launching during COVID, Corti has grown from $800K ARR in their first year to 300% growth last year. Today, they serve major healthcare systems, including all of Sweden’s medical emergency hotlines.
The Power of Mission-Driven Innovation
For Andreas, success isn’t measured just in growth metrics. “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,” he shares. “And that just rocks my world every time I hear it.”
This focus on impact drives Corti’s ambitious vision: “Our goal is covering a billion patients.” It’s a goal that brings Andreas’s journey full circle—from watching his mother navigate the healthcare system to building technology that makes that journey better for millions of others.
The story of Corti’s founding reveals a crucial truth about healthcare innovation: sometimes the most powerful solutions come not from seeking opportunity, but from living through the problem you’re trying to solve.
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