Most healthcare AI companies talk about incremental improvements. But in a recent Category Visionaries interview, Corti CEO Andreas Cleve shared a vision that’s orders of magnitude bigger: building AI that will augment patient consultations for one billion people.

Beyond Traditional Scale

“I think Corti or a company like Corti will be able to build a massive company augmenting patient consultations and engagements,” Andreas explains. But what’s particularly striking is how he frames this ambition: “Our goal is covering a billion patients.”

This isn’t just about growth for growth’s sake. The billion-patient goal serves a deeper technical and social purpose: “If we can cover that many patients with augmentation, we’re going to not only be able to build fantastic machine learning that’s able to automate more and more… but it’s also going to allow us to build a company that we think can be quite pivotal and important and hard to compete with.”

The Three Pillars of Impact

Andreas’s vision rests on three key outcomes from achieving this scale:

1. Cost Deflation: “That means deflate the cost of care”
2. Bias Reduction: “Make sure bias is less and less apparent”
3. Access Expansion: “Make sure everybody has access”

Measuring What Matters

Rather than focusing solely on traditional metrics, Corti has adopted a different measure of success: “Ultimately that’s what we count our beans on. It’s the amount of patients we get to cover for and how many times we help them during a year.”

Expanding the Scope

What makes Corti’s vision particularly compelling is its breadth. As Andreas notes, “The more spectrums, the more kind of parts of healthcare we can help in, from mental health to emergencies. We get more excited.”

This broad approach represents a fundamental shift in how AI companies typically approach healthcare. Instead of solving narrow, specific problems, Corti aims to transform the entire patient consultation experience across multiple domains.

The Network Effect Strategy

The billion-patient goal isn’t arbitrary—it’s strategic. At that scale, several powerful dynamics emerge:

1. Data Advantage: More patient interactions mean better machine learning models
2. Cost Efficiency: Greater scale enables lower cost per patient
3. Competitive Moat: The combination of data and scale creates significant barriers to entry

Lessons for B2B Founders

Corti’s vision offers several insights for other founders building ambitious B2B companies:

1. Think in Orders of Magnitude: Instead of incremental improvements, consider transformative scale
2. Connect Scale to Impact: Show how greater scale enables better outcomes
3. Build Network Effects: Design your growth strategy to create increasing returns to scale
4. Measure What Matters: Choose metrics that align with your ultimate impact
5. Stay Domain-Focused: Even massive scale should serve your core mission

The Path Forward

For Corti, the path to a billion patients isn’t just about technology—it’s about trust. As Andreas has noted elsewhere in the interview, “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.”

This patient-first approach, combined with ambitious scale, suggests a new model for healthcare technology companies: one that combines Silicon Valley-scale ambition with healthcare’s commitment to patient outcomes.

Beyond the Numbers

What’s perhaps most striking about Corti’s vision is how it maintains focus on individual impact even while pursuing massive scale. As Andreas emphasizes throughout the interview, success is measured in patient stories: “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.”

For B2B founders, particularly in healthcare and other regulated industries, Corti’s vision offers a powerful template: how to pursue transformative scale while staying true to your core mission and impact.