The Story of Corti AI: Building the Future of Clinical Intelligence

Some of the most impactful healthcare companies start with deeply personal stories. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andreas Cleve from Corti AI revealed how his mother’s experience shaped his mission to transform healthcare through AI.

A Personal Healthcare Journey

“My mom was in psychiatry, and when she was going on maternity leave with me, she was attacked by one of her patients,” Andreas shares. “She ended up spending most of my childhood and we had rebuilding her brain centers and many of her capabilities and succeeded. Fantastic woman, my best friend to this day.”

This experience colored his entire perspective on healthcare. “As you can imagine, and everybody who’s been having stints in healthcare, it just means a lot, right. The experience you’re having, the doctors you’re meeting, the last meeting, how the information was relayed, how you sleep at night based on how that information was given.”

From Banking to Healthcare Tech

Interestingly, healthcare wasn’t Andreas’s initial career path. After a soccer injury ended his athletic aspirations at 17, he considered banking. “It seemed obvious that bankers had a blast and I’d seen Wall Street and read the book, so I thought that was the way to go.”

But healthcare kept pulling him back. His first venture, Ovivo, built chatbots for healthcare staffing in 2010. “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.”

The Birth of Corti

The real breakthrough came in 2016 when Andreas and his team started exploring ambient AI in healthcare. They noticed a fundamental problem: existing healthcare technology required providers to interrupt patient care to use computers.

“The majority of big vendors today… 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. This insight led to Corti’s mission: making technology invisible in healthcare settings.

Early Challenges

The initial response wasn’t encouraging. “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.”

But rather than pivot, they persisted. Their strategy focused on finding forward-thinking healthcare organizations willing to experiment with new technology. This patience paid off as the market evolved and concerns about AI shifted from privacy to practical implementation.

Growth and Evolution

The company’s growth trajectory tells the story of increasing market acceptance. “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.

They’ve secured major contracts, including powering “all of Sweden’s medical emergency hotlines,” demonstrating the scalability of their approach from individual clinics to national healthcare systems.

The Future Vision

Looking ahead, Corti’s ambitions extend far beyond their current success. As Andreas explains, “Our goal is covering billion patients, and that’s obviously maybe going to take us more than three years. But the goal is 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, that means deflate the cost of care, make sure bias is less and less apparent, make sure everybody has access.”

This vision goes beyond simple automation or cost reduction. “The more spectrums, the more kind of parts of healthcare we can help in. From mental health to emergencies, we get more excited,” Andreas shares, highlighting their commitment to expanding the reach and impact of their technology.

In many ways, Corti’s story reflects healthcare’s broader journey toward embracing AI – from initial skepticism to cautious adoption, and finally to seeing it as essential infrastructure for delivering better care. As healthcare continues its digital transformation, Corti’s experience shows how personal motivation, technical innovation, and patience can combine to create lasting impact in even the most challenging markets.