From Farm Tech to Medical AI: How Gradient Health Transferred Pattern Recognition Expertise
At first glance, detecting crop diseases from satellite images and finding tumors in medical scans seem worlds apart. But for Joshua Miller, founder of Gradient Health, they’re surprisingly similar problems.
“The problem of finding a disease in a satellite image is, from a computer’s perspective, the same as finding a tumor in a liver,” Joshua explained in a recent Category Visionaries episode. “You’re trying to find something that shouldn’t be there in a picture.”
This insight emerged from Joshua’s experience with his first company, Farm Shots, which revolutionized agricultural monitoring. “Farm shots looked at satellite images of farms, and off of the satellite images were able to pick out whether a farm had a disease or a bug eating the crop,” he shares. The company provided farmers with daily maps highlighting potential issues, replacing traditional manual field inspections.
After selling Farm Shots to Syngenta in 2018, Joshua and his co-founder began exploring healthcare applications. Their initial focus wasn’t on medical imaging – they were working on fall detection technology for elderly care. But the challenge of gathering training data (which involved his co-founder repeatedly falling down to record samples) revealed a broader problem in healthcare AI: access to medical data.
The parallels between agricultural and medical imaging weren’t immediately obvious. Yet both fields share fundamental challenges:
- Pattern recognition in complex images
- Identifying anomalies that shouldn’t be present
- Processing large volumes of visual data
- Delivering actionable insights to specialists
This cross-industry expertise proved valuable when approaching hospitals. While healthcare institutions are traditionally cautious about new technologies, Gradient Health could demonstrate a proven track record in handling sensitive data and processing complex imagery, albeit in a different domain.
The strategy worked. Today, Fortune 500 companies directly reach out to Gradient Health, a 15-person company, seeking their expertise in medical imaging data. Their self-service platform gained 130 users in just 30 days, suggesting their agricultural pattern recognition experience translated effectively to healthcare.
The emergence of foundation models in medical imaging has further validated their approach. As Joshua notes, “If you asked me six months ago, could you build a company in a large company in imaging alone, I probably would have said no. But now that we start to see people build these ultra large scale models imaging, I would make the argument that now you can.”
For founders considering cross-industry applications of their technology, Gradient Health’s journey offers several insights:
- Look for fundamental similarities in seemingly different problems
- Leverage technical expertise even when domain knowledge differs
- Use previous success stories to build credibility in new markets
- Stay flexible enough to recognize larger opportunities
The key is identifying the core technical challenge that remains constant across industries. As Joshua’s experience shows, sometimes the biggest opportunities come from applying existing expertise to new problems in unexpected ways.
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