[00:00:20] Rich Roth: Hi, I’m Rich Roth I’m a Senior Vice President and the Chief Strategic Innovation officer with CommonSpirit Health. CommonSpirit’s one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems in the US. We service 21 states, millions of patients every day. But one of the things I think that’s special about CommonSpirit is we have a great spirit and commitment on partnership. And one of the ways we display that is our work with novel entrepreneurial companies that I believe have great potential to combine with traditional healthcare systems to truly improve patient care, quality and access. And so, today I’m with Chakri Toleti. Chakri is the CEO and founder of care.ai, and really excited to learn a little more and hear his story as a founder during this pandemic and offering something that’s really been critical to hospitals and nursing homes across the country, in other locations. Chakri, great to see you. I’d love to maybe just start a little bit, if you could give us a one-liner on kind of what care.ai is. And then I want to just talk about your founding of the company and a bunch of other stuff. I think we’re gonna have a great conversation.

[00:01:44] Chakri Toleti: Awesome. Thank you so much for this opportunity Rich and I’m super excited to be having this conversation with you. We are an AI platform that helps organizations transform their facilities into smart care facilities. That’s the genesis behind the company, to be able to build out right from the doorway all the way to the bedside, to take a sensor fusion stack that could truly give them the capability to have the real time visibility and transform the pinnacle and operational workflows and, that’s what care.ai does.

[00:02:24] Rich Roth: Chakri, I mean, I remember the way we found each other, which is probably similar to how you’re working with dozens of other health systems in the country, which is, at the very beginning of the pandemic, one of our first kind of principles was how do we safeguard our patients, and our caregivers, and employees from this thing, which is COVID-19, which no one understood how it was transmitted and it was happening in real time. And so, care.ai maybe didn’t start this way, but happened to have this kind of temperature sensing device that just really was an important component of the safety that our staff and patients felt when they were entering our hospitals. And so I’d love you to tell the story on how you started care.ai and why, and maybe it wasn’t exactly what it ended up being, at least in the near term. And now you’re pivoting back to that, but can you tell us the story of what it was like to be there in those days and have this solution that everyone wanted all of a sudden?

[00:03:35] Chakri Toleti: Yeah. Yeah Richard, great question. We started care.ai in 2019 before the pandemic, right, with the idea of bringing ambient intelligence coupled with AI sensors to the edge, that was the genesis of the company, to give that real time intelligence and visibility to care in our facilities, right, both acute, post-acute facilities. And actually the genesis even was way before that. My mom actually is kind of the idea behind it. She’s eighty years old, lives alone in India. She’s a physician. I got a call three years back saying that she slipped and fell in the bathroom, and she got stuck there for half an hour. Luckily, nothing happened but that kind of sparked an interest for me to say, hey, what can I do to really help in scenarios like that? I wanted to send her a Life Alert necklace that you wear and press a button if she falls down, but that infrastructure doesn’t work in India and wanted to see what technology was out there and pretty soon we found out and realized that there’s a significant gap in bringing in ambient intelligence and that real time awareness in healthcare, that was kind of the genesis and said, hey, bringing in AI and the technologies that are prevalent in other industries, like, transportation, if you look at autonomous driving vehicles or even you take a cup of coffee from Starbucks, there’s more AI that goes into manufacturing a Coke can or a cup of coffee than in healthcare when it comes to real time knowledge, that was kind of the genesis behind care.ai and one of the sensors that we were using in a rule that, when we deploy, gives that real time data was a temperature sensing sensor and the use cases that you’re looking at where IPC infection prevention control at an enterprise level, right? In post-acute, it could be elopement use-cases so that we can see in complete darkness at the entrances, right? Like you said, we realized adding additional capability to the entry screening platform will truly enable those workflows you were talking about Rich, and that’s how we evolved our enhanced capability of our entry screening sensors. And today, we have great clients like you all that leverage the platform that truly protect the frontline workers and anybody entering these care facilities, across the country.

[00:06:03] Rich Roth: One of the things that I think is so interesting about care.ai is, I know that you have many different channels of organizations that you serve. You serve hospitals and health systems. You serve longterm care and rehab facilities. You serve governments. Curious about your experience on selling into these very different types of organizations and what is different and what is similar between a large government and a skilled nursing facility or a health system.

[00:06:35] Chakri Toleti: I think one thing I think the pandemic did to all the care facilities and all the organizations that deliver care, it kind of exposed the vulnerabilities, the appetite for innovation at a higher speed and looking at startups like us has grown exponentially, right. That kind of unified some of the buying patterns and decisions that can truly automate some of these workflows. I think that has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. We do see a significant commonality in terms of the buying decisions, especially when it comes to making sure the frontline workers are protected and the patients are protected. I think that has become top of mind for all the organizations, right? So if you’re able to improve efficiency and show the value, then I think the sales paths start to work and say, okay, obviously the contracting and some of the nuances between post-acute and acute, and the government will definitely vary. But at the end of the day, the value that you deliver to optimize and make sure that the quality of care is increasing kind of converges to a single path for the sales channel, if you will.

[00:07:48] Rich Roth: Give us a sense of scale on how much care.ai has grown before the pandemic and where you’re at today, both in terms of customers and in terms of your employees. And then I’d love to hear also, what is it like to run a company in this virtual environment?

[00:08:10] Chakri Toleti: We were fortunate enough to work with great clients like you all. We have 1,500+ facilities deployed. We’re working with organizations like you all, like CommonSpirit, Kaiser, Ascension, some of the largest healthcare institutions in the acute space. Similarly in the post-acute, we work with Genesis, Kindred. We just signed a pretty significant in the state of Kentucky, where I think 98% of all post-acute facilities qualify to get our system for free with the CMT grants. So we’re working across multiple care settings. When we started working with you Richard, we were probably 30 plus people in the company, to where we’ve just crossed, last month, the hundred mark. We are a hundred plus people and, like you mentioned, it brings a new set of dynamics when you have a remote workforce and growing at a rapid pace and being a startup. These three combinations are always a challenging mix. But we were very fortunate enough to have a strong client base that understands, in this environment, having that flexibility in terms of services, deployment, capabilities is very important. Similarly, I think we were fortunate enough to bring in the team, which understands the people who we serve and the importance of delivering quality solutions. We had a different tiered approach of bringing the right skills of people. So we do have a significant footprint of employees in Florida, in Orlando, and then in Atlanta and a few other cities, but we were fortunate enough to pick the right mindset, skillset, and passionate people that want to work in this industry.

[00:09:59] Rich Roth: As you’re implementing all across the country, I’m sure you’ve thought about implementing one way. And then now we’re in this entirely different world. How does that implementation work based upon where you were and where you’re at now? Because I think that’s pretty fascinating given how many people use care.ai, how you can imagine that getting to so many places.

[00:10:19] Chakri Toleti: For example, in CommonSpirit, we’ve not visited a single site. We’ve deployed thousands of devices and tens of thousands of users use our platform every day. And we’ve not visited a single site. So that’s something that I think, in this environment we’ve learned, it’s not like we, out of the bag, knew how to do that. So we learned very quickly that our core foundation was designed in such a way that, just like how you would ship a Nest camera or our IOT device, and consumer would plug it into their house, and they’d be up and running with minimum conflagration and intervention. So that’s the same model we adopted. It’s like plug and play kind of infrastructure we’re working with. And that was the main reason we were able to scale to thousands of devices, and hundreds of thousands of users using our platform, if not millions of users using our platform every day. Being able to architect it and build it in a way that we can deliver in a very scalable and secure way. We had to learn that. And I think that’s one of the biggest advantages we were able to get out of the forced situation, if you will.

[00:11:34] Rich Roth: Yeah, because certainly, in another world, you would have had a giant sales force on planes all across the country, living in cities everywhere, installing things. And it’s really creative in my mind how you had to adjust for that. Part of the goal of Day Zero really is to think about the next set of entrepreneurs, giving a human face to people that are creating positive change in society. You have a different background than most anybody, and it’s not maybe the typical background. You were in the entertainment industry, video games, movies. Can you share a little bit about your journey for the audience about how you got to where you’re at?

[00:12:17] Chakri Toleti: For me, it was always being about telling a story and creating. That’s what I always wanted to do since I was a little kid. I wanted to make movies and work for Disney, things that really bring that creative juices flowing. So that’s what always excited me and I think inherently, when we peel back and look at problem solving in any industry, I think, coming up with a way to solve a problem with the least amount of change to an existing established system is what I think is quite exciting and interesting. The medium and technology keeps evolving. My daughter just started college and her generation didn’t grow without social media. If they didn’t have a mobile device and all the social media connectivity, they wouldn’t know what to do. But, there are lot of advantages and disadvantages. But understanding the technology and where we are going, and how do we really positively use those tools in any industry that we pick that we want to work in is, I think, quite exciting. And for me, it happens to be healthcare. And I think healthcare genuinely has a significant opportunity to improve how we deliver care and how do we bring down the cost of delivering that high quality care? And we can learn a lot from other industries, their automation and tools, how they use the tools. It could be self-service checkout in a grocery store or, you use a rewards app at Starbucks. All of these different experiences that other industries are creating for the consumers, I think we can learn a lot from that and adopt it into healthcare to really reduce the cost and increase the quality dramatically. And that is what is fun and exciting, I guess, for me.

[00:14:18] Rich Roth: I think you’ve been a, this is like a double or thrice successful entrepreneur with companies that you’ve created in the past and exited. Why go to bat again?

[00:14:33] Chakri Toleti: I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. I don’t know. This is my fourth time around, been through this movie before, I guess. There’s so much innovation that still needs to be done in healthcare. And I always feel that the day you stop thinking or creating something, is the day you start aging. My mom is 85 or, sorry, actually 82. She wakes up at five, six every morning, works until 11 in the night every day, even today. That is what I think drives me quite a bit is I genuinely feel that the day you stop thinking, creating and innovating is the day you start aging. So I, I don’t know what I would do if I stopped working. I would go crazy.

[00:15:26] Rich Roth: So, tell us about what is, like obviously, you’re a growing company and you’re getting supporting capital, you’ve had supporting capital to grow. There’s things you can do on your own. What’s it like raising fundraising during kind of this period? There’s so many different players out there, names you never heard before, and old names that are tried and true. And I’m sure care.ai gets calls from everybody. So what’s that world like right now versus maybe what you do used to do in the past in your other companies?

[00:15:56] Chakri Toleti: It’s all self-funded today and we just started our fundraise process, but I think the most important thing is culture fit, right? Wherever you go and try to partner with the right firm to raise money, the most important thing is, do your values match and culturally, is it a good fit or not from a long-term perspective. There’s a lot of money out there, especially in this environment and in healthcare technology. But being able to partner with someone who truly believes in what you’re doing and has a longterm strategic view on things is going to be extremely important. And be flexible and open. Being flexible and open is very important. They’re coming with a checkbook, so they will have certain expectations you would have to work within. And make sure they understand why you started the business and what your goals are, and make sure the team, the senior management team, everybody understands the dynamics if you raise money, and they’re a hundred percent bought in, and the investors also like everybody in the senior management team is extremely important. And fortunately we have an amazing team. All of our senior management team, all my partners are amazing people to start with. You wake up and you have a lot of fun working together day in and day out. I think you spend, especially in a startup 12, 14, 16 hour days together, so it’s just very important that you have a solid, strong team that you work internally. Similarly, you have a very strong relationship and a team that you bring on board as investors.

[00:17:35] Rich Roth: What advice would you give to the next person that’s out there? A lot of people in the audience on Day Zero are entrepreneurs thinking about, or future entrepreneurs thinking about, starting maybe even their first company. What advice would you partake or give to anyone that is in those shoes and has an idea to improve healthcare, society, and is thinking about, should I go for it?

[00:17:56] Chakri Toleti: So So I think passion, and it would be very cliche words I would use, but it is true. Having that passion behind any idea that you have and always keep innovating, and be open to every and any idea, right? There’s nothing called a bad idea, right? You can take it and understand it and how you use it is completely up to you. But, be open and surround yourself with amazing people and advisers and people that can help you grow. I think that is going to be extremely important in this environment, especially, where everything is remote, if you’re starting a new business, that the workforce is remote, the sales processes are different, especially in healthcare, and that there are a lot of constraints. The system is strained. So, be agile about it and, as the, pandemic changes and the market dynamics change, be ready to pivot, shift back, and be open to expanding the capability of your idea and the solution that you’re trying to go to market with. It’s going to be extremely important to be successful in this environment, especially.

[00:19:09] Rich Roth: Well, Chakri, thank you so much for the conversation today. It was great to hear more about your story and wish you.

[00:19:19] Chakri Toleti: Thank you Rich, thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity and all the support you’ve extended to us. This is amazing, getting this opportunity from you all to be a part of this podcast.

[00:19:29] Rich Roth: Absolutely. Alright.