Building Trust at Scale: How Corti AI is Reshaping Healthcare Technology Distribution

Churchill isn't typically mentioned in startup conversations. But for Andreas from Corti AI, the former British Prime Minister's persistence exemplifies what it takes to build transformative healthcare technology: "A guy like him, who for 40 years was one of the most hated people in public Britain, ended up becoming the man who led him out of the Second World War because he believed that truly stood by his principles."

This perspective has shaped Corti AI's approach to building ambient AI technology for healthcare since 2016. When most founders were chasing quick wins in consumer AI, Andreas and his team chose to tackle one of technology's most challenging markets: healthcare systems and government institutions.

The journey began with a fundamental insight about technology adoption in healthcare. As Andreas explains, "The majority of big vendors today, only 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."

Instead of accepting this premise, Corti focused on making technology invisible. Their system augments patient consultations across three key moments: pre-consultation preparation, real-time support during conversations, and post-consultation documentation. The goal isn't just automation – it's augmentation that preserves the human element of healthcare.

This approach has driven impressive growth. "We did eight hundred k first year AR, and from then we've been growing several hundred percent per year. Last year we grew 300%. This year we're hoping to grow still more than 200%," Andreas shares. But these numbers only tell part of the story.

The real GTM innovation came from their approach to regulation. While many startups view healthcare regulations as obstacles, Andreas saw them differently: "A lot of entrepreneurs have just looked at regulation sort of as this weird bump on the road, something to just get passed. Today it's something that we think about as a competitive advantage or at least edge."

This mindset shaped their entire distribution strategy. Rather than targeting individual clinicians, Corti pursued enterprise-wide deployments, working with "entire governments" and covering "all of Sweden's medical emergency hotlines." These deals can take up to a year to close, but they create deeply embedded relationships.

The timing of their market entry proved crucial. When they started in 2016, ambient AI in healthcare was met with skepticism. "The majority of people was really scared about sort of the Big Brother Hollywood kind of way of thinking about it," Andreas recalls. "Nobody wanted ambient AI in a clinic listening and it felt super Big Brother."

Rather than pivot to an easier market, they doubled down on finding early adopters who shared their vision. This patience paid off as the market evolved. Today, they're positioned uniquely as healthcare systems look to implement AI responsibly.

Their differentiation strategy focuses on quality of care, not just cost savings. As Andreas explains, "The best paya providers in the world will not just want to cut off 5% of some kind of cost base if they cannot know for certain then it leads to better or ad part quality of care because that's ultimately the promise that brand makes."

For B2B founders, perhaps the most valuable lesson is Andreas's perspective on building trust in regulated markets: "Trust is something you build over that time... 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."

Looking ahead, Corti aims to cover a billion patients. But Andreas measures success not just in numbers: "The more spectrums, the more kind of parts of healthcare we can help in. From mental health to emergencies, we get more excited."

The lesson? In complex enterprise markets, especially healthcare, sustainable growth often comes from embracing friction rather than trying to eliminate it. Each regulatory hurdle and lengthy procurement process becomes an opportunity to demonstrate credibility and build lasting relationships that create defendable distribution channels.