From SMS to AI: How Corti AI’s Previous Startup Shaped Their Enterprise Go-to-Market

Before building Corti AI’s ambient intelligence platform for healthcare, Andreas Cleve had already learned valuable lessons about healthcare technology adoption through his first startup, Ovivo. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared how these early experiences shaped Corti’s successful enterprise go-to-market strategy.

The Early Days of Healthcare Automation

In 2010, when most people were still skeptical about automation in healthcare, Andreas and his team built something that seems almost primitive today: “We built an SMS and Facebook messenger based chatbot that allowed nursing homes home care units and hospitals to shift their staff usage towards using oSTAFF instead of temp agencies,” he explains.

While simple by today’s standards, this early venture provided crucial insights about technology adoption in healthcare settings. The team discovered that success depended not just on the technology, but on finding the right use case for the right environment.

Finding the Right Entry Point

“Back then you didn’t have bring your own device, everybody didn’t have smartphones. So us coming there saying, hey, we’re going to text you, like a robot is going to see, our system is going to text you… that was weird for them,” Andreas recalls.

However, they found success by targeting a specific use case: “Home care where people was driving around, that was like very kosher.” This taught them the importance of finding the right entry point for new technology in healthcare – a lesson that would prove invaluable with Corti.

The Evolution of Healthcare Tech

The experience with Ovivo shaped their approach to building and selling Corti. As Andreas explains, “Everybody who’s doing important work with people, they’re ultimately picking that job, if they are deliberately picking that job, to be that person that helps or is something important to those people.”

This insight led to a fundamental principle: technology should enhance, not replace, the human element of healthcare. It’s reflected in how they position Corti today: “Technology, as it deflates makes everything cheaper and more accessible, more distributed, also makes or usually becomes more and more invisible.”

The Timing Factor

The Ovivo experience also taught them about market timing. While chatbots might seem obvious now, in 2010 they were cutting edge. “Remember, this was 2010. Software as a service was still new back then,” Andreas notes.

This perspective helped them navigate the initial skepticism about ambient AI in healthcare. When they launched Corti in 2016, “The majority of people was really scared about sort of the Big Brother Hollywood kind of way of thinking about it.”

Building for Trust

Perhaps the most valuable lesson from Ovivo was understanding how healthcare organizations adopt new technology. The experience taught them that trust is built through consistent presence and reliability.

“Trust is something you build over that time,” Andreas emphasizes. “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.”

The Enterprise Evolution

These lessons have shaped Corti’s impressive growth trajectory. From their first year revenue of “eight hundred k” to growing “300%” last year, they’ve successfully scaled by applying these early insights about healthcare technology adoption.

For B2B founders entering healthcare or other regulated markets, Corti’s journey offers valuable lessons about patience, timing, and the importance of finding the right entry point. Sometimes the key to future success lies in learning from seemingly simpler solutions of the past.

Looking ahead, Andreas sees these lessons continuing to shape their growth: “The more spectrums, the more kind of parts of healthcare we can help in… we get more excited.” It’s a reminder that in healthcare technology, the path to innovation often starts with understanding and respecting the fundamentals of how the industry adopts change.