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From Soccer Dreams to AI Innovation: How Personal Healthcare Experiences Shaped Corti’s Mission

When Andreas Cleve’s mother was attacked by a psychiatric patient in 1986, it changed both their lives forever. “She ended up spending most of my childhood in rehab, rebuilding her brain centers and many of her capabilities,” Andreas recalls. Those years of watching his mother navigate the healthcare system left an indelible mark: “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.”

Today, as CEO of Corti, a patient consultations platform that’s raised $32 million in funding, Andreas is transforming how healthcare providers interact with patients by making technology invisible rather than intrusive. His journey from aspiring soccer player to healthcare tech innovator offers valuable lessons about timing, persistence, and the power of personal motivation in building deep tech solutions.

The Path to Healthcare Innovation

Andreas’s entry into healthcare technology wasn’t direct. After a motorcycle accident ended his soccer career at 17, he initially set his sights on banking. However, his childhood experiences with healthcare kept pulling him back. His first venture, Ovivo, developed a pioneering chatbot system for healthcare staffing in 2010—well before chatbots became mainstream.

“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.”

This early experience taught him a crucial lesson about healthcare innovation: “Everybody who’s doing important work with people, they’re ultimately picking that job if they are deliberately taking that job to be that person that helps or is something important to those people.”

Building Invisible Technology

In 2016, Andreas co-founded Corti with a radical vision: making healthcare technology disappear into the background. “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,” Andreas explains.

Corti’s platform takes a different approach, using AI to augment patient consultations in real-time. The system operates across three key phases:

• Pre-consultation preparation
• In-consultation support
• Post-consultation documentation and analysis

The results speak for themselves. Since going to market during COVID, Corti has grown from $800K ARR in their first year to 300% growth last year, with projected growth exceeding 200% this year. They now serve major healthcare systems, including all of Sweden’s medical emergency hotlines.

The Trust Challenge in Healthcare AI

Unlike many AI startups rushing to market, Corti takes 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 patience has paid off. While many competitors focus solely on cost reduction through automation, Corti differentiates itself by solving the healthcare provider’s central dilemma: improving care while reducing costs. As Andreas puts it, “You are a sophisticated payer provider, you have ideas of what good looks like and you want not just to automate or cut cost, but you also want to do it while improving care.”

A Vision for Global Impact

Looking ahead, Andreas has ambitious plans for Corti. “Our goal is covering a billion patients,” he states, explaining that this scale would allow them 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.”

For Andreas, success isn’t measured just in growth metrics or technological achievements. It’s measured in patient impact. “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.”

From those early days watching his mother rebuild her life to now leading a company that’s transforming patient care, Andreas’s journey demonstrates how personal experience, coupled with technological vision, can drive meaningful change in healthcare delivery. As AI continues to reshape healthcare, Corti’s approach of making technology invisible while improving care quality offers a compelling model for the future of patient consultations.