AI Revolutionizing Health & Access | Entrepreneur Stories

Let's open up with an intro. Your full name, your company's name, and just like a tight elevator pitch. Yes, yes, dude.

Straight from Italy's tech scene, Pierangelo Raiola and his team. And he and his team at Nora Health AI are reshaping healthcare, giving patients the tools to navigate their wellness journey with clarity.

I'm originally from Italy. I'm born in Napoli, which is in the south. But when I was 7, I had this crazy passion for the mountains, and I started doing a competition in alpine skiing. And very soon, my, my dream was to be an Olympian ski racer. I had the pleasure to travel the world because of my alpine skiing passion. I was drafted professionally when I was 17 years old, and in this particular moment of my life, I was just about wanting to compete at the highest level. Then unfortunately, when it comes to any sports, you are exposed to, you know, injuries, and injuries became a part of my life. A couple of them were addressed by the Italian Federation. Others, unfortunately, were self-treatable. And it was a problem that I experienced on a daily basis. You always navigate on the internet and you try to find the right solution. Most of the time, I just didn't find the right content and I made all the possible wrong choices. And that unfortunately culminated with a chronic deficiency on my knee, which compromised my professional alpine skiing career. So imagine that we create a tool where anytime I want to take care of my daily health roadmap, let's call it in that way, then I have the perfect choice, the perfect addressable providers that can satisfy my needs. And this is clearly missing today. And I think that's a massive problem. And one of the things that we need to change in terms of consumer habits is that we think about our health when we have the ouch moment. When we live, we have 20, 25 problems. Then you have one health problem and that's the only problem you have. So that has to change because we can take care of our health every day. And I think having a digital assistant that is in this journey with you, with the right information, the precise, actually tailored information that are super personal to you, that's going to be a game changer.

From symptom analysis to personalized care, Nora Health AI empowers patients with precise, data-driven guidance.

I'm Pierangelo Raiola, the CEO and co-founder of Nora Health AI. Nora Health AI is the first AI assistant that enables you to navigate with confidence and precision throughout your care journey. So we started Nora Health in February, and for us it was very important to go to the market as quickly as possible. We launched the first MVP, I think it was the 20th, 25th of February, and to date we scaled over under-25 condition across physical therapy and weight loss. And the idea is really that, again, if you have any pain or if you have any weight loss goal, you can use this agent because it's going to provide a tailored, hyper-personalized plan that belongs to you. And I think that to be successful in this business, it's really that we want to count at the end of the year How many people feel better, they're free of pain, or they just are more self-confident because they're taking care of our healthcare journey.

So what would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper mean to your company right now?

Working with Tim Draper, it would be a privilege. And again, I believe that when you have access to a person that has been so successful so passionate about spreading entrepreneurship throughout the world, you can just learn. And just so from a learning opportunity, when you have access to such a level of knowledge, such a level of person that can connect you to the right path in terms of how can you be advised on your businesses, your product, your vision, your go-to-market from a capital perspective, I mean, it's been Probably one of the best investors historically.

Through making healthcare more intuitive and empowering, they're crafting the future of medicine, one informed patient at a time.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for Nora Health right now?

One million investment in Nora will be just a testament to our vision, the possibility to accelerate With our growing trajectory to expand coverage so we can be in more consumer, we can touch and we can enable all of you to use our product globally. We're very close with our family. My father and my mother, my parents, they've been outstanding because they always made us to express ourselves. I don't think if I look backward that I could have imagined to be right now in New York building a tech company. I think it will be extremely surprising, to say the least, given that sports has been my life.

Just use your full names, the name of the company, and what you guys are— what your project is about.

MIT's sharpest minds, Erin Dewicki and Brenda Ong, are reimagining Lyme disease detection, empowering families to protect their health with groundbreaking at-home testing.

So I have been a healthcare provider, a physician associate in orthopedic surgery, primarily pediatrics, for the past 15 years in Massachusetts.

I previously was a career police officer, so I was working for the Singapore Police Force.

After COVID, I realized that healthcare access was really unequal and that there were varying levels of care depending on what people could afford in terms of their insurance coverage and what was being allowed. And the sense of injustice that people in our country access different levels of care depending on their financial status was really getting to me. So after COVID, you know, that feeling got worse and worse, and I wanted to be part of the solution of what comes next. And so I started looking at academic programs where I could learn the skills needed to help be part of healthcare reform, ultimately.

And whilst leading COVID operations, I came to realize the power of technology and informed test results being able to actually make people safe. So like my passion and mission in life is to try to create a safer world. And so through that COVID experience, I came to MIT to try to make that pivot. Met my co-founders here, and then we decided to start Lime Alert to try tackle the disease, Lyme disease, and try to create a solution that would actually help prevent Lyme disease.

With at-home tick testing to rapid Lyme disease detection, Lyme Alert transforms worry into actionable knowledge.

I'm Erin Dewicki, and I'm the CEO of Lyme Alert.

I'm Brenda Ong, and I'm the COO of Lyme Alert, and we're building the first home test kit for Lyme disease that tests the tick.

So every single day I get calls from my patients who say, hey, I found a tick on me, or I found a tick on my kid. What do I do with it? And the answer is you can mail them to a lab and test them, but the turnaround time for that is not necessarily great and it's expensive.

Yeah, Lyme is like one of those funny diseases that you actually know how to treat it, and it's one of those that it's difficult to diagnose. The diagnosis is more difficult than the cure. So that was why we wanted to tackle the Problem with the diagnostics aspect of it.

So we've partnered with a high-performance Olympic-level dressage farm, and the horses get ticks all over their faces when they go in the fields. So that farm is going to be collecting them for us and labeling them with the horse's name and the date they collected. You know, they're blooming again, essentially, so the babies are becoming teenagers. size ticks, and we are going to go out into a field with a white sheet and drag it and collect them in fields too. So it is very glamorous. We've just started our first field trial, so we're in the process of collecting ticks and bringing them to the lab and making sure that the lab standard meets our test standard. So we're all participating in that. So we are a team of 4, and although we have job titles and basic responsibilities, Everybody participates in everything.

In making Lyme disease testing convenient, they're building a healthier tomorrow where prevention meets breakthrough innovation.

I think it's definitely not easy to be heard in a room full of men. But in a lot of ways, we just have been trying to prove ourselves.

It's—

unfortunately, women in all sorts of industries get spoken over or corrected or explained, even when they're experts in their field. You know, we're, we're from MIT and we still have to show extra data. And I would hope that by the time my girls are older, that they can go into a room and speak on their merit without having to work twice as hard to prove themselves against the guys who are doing exactly the same thing, or even less, and yet getting more opportunities.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for your company right now?

So a million dollars would really allow us to expedite our product, help us to test our product-market fit. So I think with a million dollars, we'll probably be able to get our product out in the market much faster, and we'll be able to garner a lot more sales ahead of time.

And further, $1 million would allow us to test for multiple diseases from a single tick, which we know is important to millions of Americans whose ticks are co-infected more than 10% of the time. I think, I think my entire life I've been considered an underdog. I didn't grow up with the right background. I didn't have the family who went to college. I didn't have those models for what that looked like. And yet I've continued to defy expectations. I was a 5-foot-3 Division 1 soccer goalkeeper. You know, like, I don't like when people tell me I'm not going to succeed at something because I love to prove people wrong.

I think, like, you're never ready to do a startup. And I think the reality is it's not an easy decision to make. So for all of us, we had to give up probably good jobs and a stable income. But if we don't do it now, there's no other time in our lives that we will be able to do it. And I think we all happen to be people who live to try to minimise regret in our lives. And for me, I don't want to be like that 10 years later down the road and saying like, I wish I tried doing a startup.

So let's just start with an introduction, um, just your name, your company name, and kind of a concise pitch of what you guys do.

Okay.

In Silicon Valley, Mini Suri and her team at Velmini are advancing dental care with AI that enhances diagnostic precision beyond conventional methods.

I actually went to MIT to do my MBA. In 2016, I still remember the day when my mom, my mom called that my dad could not go to his boardroom. You know, things were not looking good, so they had to take him to the hospital, and the scans, his scans did not look good. 4 months back, his scans were taken and everything looked good according to the doctors. But this time I told them to come to U.S. They were both in India and I told them to come to U.S. and I took them to Sloan Kettering and they found out it was grade 4 glioblastoma. So 4 months back when we looked at the scan, it was quite obvious that there was something. this would have been caught at that time, glioblastoma could have been— wouldn't have progressed that fast. It changed my life because I could not believe that this could be so easily missed or, you know, misdiagnosed. And when I went back to MIT, I knew I had to do something different. I started taking healthcare certification along with MBA. My MBA project became electronic health record for rural India. I came out, went back to Citigroup, back to my job, but something changed. I was made the head of building the AI platform for Citi and then moved to Uber and then to the AI company and then It so happened one of my dear friends who's a serial entrepreneur said his cousin who's a dentist didn't know what to do during COVID time. And I said, look, I do AI all day long. How about we build, you know, a scheduling, rescheduling bot? Because I knew how to build the AI bots. And that's where Wellmoney started.

Beyond X-rays to 3D scans, Vellmini elevates dental diagnostics to new levels of accuracy.

Hi, I'm Minni Suri, CEO and co-founder of Vellmini. Interestingly, Vellmini stands for robot in Icelandic, AI for, for automation. So Vellmini is a dental AI company We do AI on all kinds of radiographs, whether they are flat x-rays, cone beam or CT scan x-rays, intraoral images, or any kind of x-rays or scans that help the dentist to identify the problems. We have our headquarters in Palo Alto. We do have a couple people in Palo Alto, I mean California. We have team, we have a decentralized team. We have an R&D center in Orlando and also in India. My team is global. We are a happy virtual team. We do meet every now and then in, in the location of our choice, but the team works around the clock.

So what would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper mean for your career?

I've met Tim many or multiple times at Tycon. He's such an iconic figure who has really gone above and beyond to help founders and startups like us. What Tim has started, this whole Meet the Drapers show, is so phenomenal. He's given us launchpad. to companies like us. For me, this, this is an important launchpad for me, what Tim has created for us. And I'll tell you why. Because at Valmini, our mission is to really help 1 billion people improve oral health. Oral health is the gateway to general health. I couldn't have asked for a better platform than what I have got here at Meet the Draper, because your show goes around the globe. You touch people where I couldn't have reached.

Where compassionate care meets breakthrough technology, Mini Suri's Velmini ensures every patient receives the excellence they deserve.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for your company right now?

So a million-dollar investment would mean for us, for us, is kind of very critical for us at this point. The reason is we just got FDA cleared, and FDA, before FDA clearance, we could not sell sell our software, or they call it software medical device, which is the AI product. Post-FDA, we need, we need funding so that we could hire marketing, we could hire sales, we could build support team, and we can start selling our product to a lot more dental offices, dentists in the United States. There are about 206,000 dentists in the U.S., and we can take the market if we have the funding. So this show and this funding would be very critical for us at this point to really expand our outreach. If we win, the first person I'll call is my mom. It's just because she understands, and not that the second person I'll call is my husband, but my mom, because this journey started with my dad and this was his dream. But I must say that, you know, they say there's women behind every man. I would say there were 2 men behind me. One is my dad and my husband. I have promises to keep, and the promise that I've given it to my dad. So, Valmini keeps me going. I, I eat, live, and sleep Valmini.

So, we have Can you just start out with an intro, like your name, your company's name, and sort of the most concise pitch as to what you guys do? Elevator pitch.

Across the heart of Turkey, Kurşat Çelan is reimagining mobility for the visually impaired, upgrading the traditional white cane with intelligent AI integration.

As we walk, we enhance the mobility of visually impaired people. There are more than 250 million visually impaired people, and with our patented Smart Cane technology, we encourage them to participate in social life independently and freely. So WeWalk Smart Cane detects overhead obstacles, alerts its users, with haptic feedback, gives turn-by-turn navigation, informs you about restaurants, cafes while you are passing by, and you can talk to your cane because it has custom-trained voice assistant technology and it talks you back. It's like a magic wand. You can ask whatever you want. Hey, VWOKE, take me to Starbucks. Hey, VWOKE, take me to nearest bus stop. And it guides you step by step. As a team, we have implemented various technologies for visually impaired people before, and also even we have one exit. And we all— we develop all our technology solutions based on lived experiences. Right now I am talking as a blind entrepreneur co-founder, but in our team, I am not the only blind person. So we have engineers, product managers, so they are also visually impaired, and we develop all our solutions based on lived experiences.

WeWalk delivers independence through smart navigation with the world's first AI-enhanced My name is Kürsat Ceylan.

I'm originally Turkish, and our company is headquartered in London, and we have just opened up our office in New York. Right now, I'm based out of New York. I am blind from birth and co-founder of WeWalk. The feedback that we got from our users—a teacher from Ireland. reached us. He shared his, how can I say, gratitude. Is it right?

Yeah.

Yeah, and he shared his gratitude and he told his story. He said, you know, I lost my sight 2 years ago. I was just staying at home, and right now with the WeWalk Smart Cane, I turned back to social life. I'm so thank you to all that you developed this technology and you changed my life. So beyond all those awards, etc., this feedback was the unforgettable moment for all of our team.

What would it mean to you to work with Tim Draper for your company right now?

So as WeWalk, we want to change millions of visually impaired people in the world. If you want to change the world, you cannot do it alone. You need people who can support you, encourage you, guide you, also help you to— while you are walking towards your goal. I believe there is no better opportunity than working with Tim. And working with Tim would be amazing.

While making movement safer and more intuitive, they are building a more inclusive future where technology meets boundless human potential.

What would a million-dollar investment mean to your company right now?

So far, we developed our technology and we registered it in CE, FCC, FDA. We are ready to reach millions of visually impaired people, and this 1 million will be an amazing step towards our goal and change visually impaired people's lives. All entrepreneurs know that this is a really long journey and you need support, and I can't do all those things. without support of my wife, Fulia. And because I work really hard and she loves what we are doing, she believes our cause, our noble vision, and she's a real fan of WeWalk. When we are talking about entrepreneurship, most of the people say if you want to be an entrepreneur, So you have to have some characteristics such as you have to be resilient, you have to push the limits, you have to know how to deal with challenges. This is the thing that I have been doing for my entire life because if you are a blind person and if you want to contribute and create value for people, People, you have to, you have to find ways to cope with challenges.