Partnering with Telepatia Building the AI Doctor for Latin America

We are excited to double down and invest in Telepatia's $33M Series A led by a16z after leading their seed less than 12 months ago.

We first met Nico at a dinner we hosted on Stanford's campus in November 2023, nearly 18 months before we invested in Telepatia.

At the time, AI healthcare was not yet the breakout category it has become and LatAm was largely an afterthought for venture investors. For Nico, healthcare was personal. He grew up around medicine. His father was a physician, and shortly before Nico began graduate school at Stanford, his father sadly passed away from an undiagnosed condition. His father's nickname was Telepatia, a reference to his extraordinary memory and almost intuitive ability to understand people. So when Nico talked about building the AI doctor for Latin America, it did not sound like a pitch - it was him explaining his life's work.

In our experience, many of the best founders are early to important trends, not because they are chasing what is fashionable, but because they are living close enough to a problem to see the shift before everyone else does.

That passion was matched by unusual relentlessness. Over the next 18 months, we stayed close as Nico searched for the right wedge. He took countless red-eye flights from Stanford to Colombia and Brazil in his second year to meet with hospitals, doctors, payors, and healthcare operators. He sat in the workflow. He iterated. He followed the pain.

The Market Insight: Intelligence is Capacity

What Nico discovered through those customer conversations was that the world needs more doctors, more nurses, more appointments, and more clinical throughput. But we cannot train enough doctors fast enough to meet demand.

In a supply-constrained system, intelligence is capacity. For the first time, software can do more than digitize healthcare workflows. It can create capacity by giving clinicians more leverage.

Latin America needs an AI-native healthcare company built from the ground up for its doctors, hospitals, and patients. Historically, there have been very few large software outcomes in the region as 1) global companies (i.e. CRM) dominated, and 2) budgets for IT were constrained. We believe now is different for two primary reasons with Telepatia.

First, the market is very fragmented: no EMR has more than 5% market share, so it is difficult to localize another AI product for Latin America. Further, healthcare is local at every level, from protocols to workflows and beyond. Second, AI-native products can address the labor, not software budgets in hospitals by expanding capacity targeting ~10% of LatAm's GDP, or more than $300B of clinical and administrative labor.

From wedge to platform

Telepatia starts where healthcare happens: the consultation. The initial product is an AI scribe and clinician-focused agent that helps doctors document visits, generate clinical notes, and more. The value is immediate, and the growth has been stellar. That wedge has already helped Telepatia sign some of the largest hospitals in Latin America.

One of the things that stood out in Nico's seed pitch was the scale of his ambition. He was not pitching a better scribe, or even a better healthcare workflow tool. He talks about building the AI doctor for Latin America — and, one day, helping Latin America win its first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984.

One of the things that stood out in Nico's seed pitch was the scale of his ambition. He was not pitching a better scribe, or even a better healthcare workflow tool. He talks about building the AI doctor for Latin America — and, one day, helping Latin America win its first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984.