He left medicine to build an AI tool – now, it’s worth $460 million
Dr. Thomas Kelly is the co-founder and CEO of Heidi.
Courtesy of Thomas Kelly
In 2017, Thomas Kelly graduated from medical school and finally became a doctor — a career he had dreamt about as a kid and spent years working towards. But once he started practicing, Kelly realized that the job was different from what he’d imagined.
“My time as a doctor [was] very constrained. I only get 10 minutes for the patient,” he told CNBC Make It. “I was finding I had, you know, 100 patients to see in a day, and [was] always in a rush and always coordinating 700 tests and a million tasks.”
“In a perfect world … I would spend as much time with [patients] as they need … I would understand their family, I would remember them deeply, and then I would check in on them regularly,” he said. However, the reality is that, like many other clinicians, he faced “incredible burnout” working in the field.
Inspired to tackle this problem, Kelly created an AI tool that helps transcribe medical visits, generates clinical notes and more, with the goal of lessening the load on doctors and clinicians.
Now, the 33-year-old is the co-founder and CEO of Heidi, an AI medical scribe. The company announced its $65 million Series B round in October, valuing the company at $465 million.
Early exploration
Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, Kelly was inspired by his primary care doctor to pursue medicine.
“I just loved my primary care doctor … He was like, the pinnacle of using your intelligence and knowledge for good,” said Kelly. “He always had an amazing plan. He was very warm, great bedside manner, but also, just incredibly sharp and intelligent always.”
That experience stayed with him. During university, he explored other interests such as math and computer science before ultimately deciding to go into medicine. In 2013, he enrolled into the University of Melbourne where he began medical school.
While studying medicine, Kelly also started a side hustle where he posted educational videos on YouTube and tutored students interested in getting into medicine.
To his surprise, the videos began to attract many students, more than he could handle at the time, and what started as a hobby steadily grew into a small business. To better manage his time during his tutoring business, Kelly began experimenting with building out artificial intelligence tools.
“The first AI product I ever tried to build was an interview tutor that people could practice with,” said Kelly. This tool, called “Oscar” allowed students to practice conversations with a medical interviewer, and by 2020, about 20,000 students were using it, he added.
“That was the seed that grew into Heidi,” he said.
As Oscar improved, Kelly began to notice its broader potential. “There was no [single] lightbulb moment,” Kelly said, however, he realized that if an AI tool could understand a conversation between a student and a medical examiner, it could do the same for a patient and a doctor.
“You could then create clinical notes. You…
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