When deep tech healthcare startups share their growth metrics, they often hide behind vague percentages. But in a recent Category Visionaries interview, Corti CEO Andreas Cleve offered a refreshingly transparent look at their growth trajectory—and the complex sales dynamics driving it.
From Zero to Market Leadership
After spending three to four years building their technology and conducting a full clinical trial, Corti entered the market during COVID. Their first-year results were modest but promising: “We did 800k our first year AR,” Andreas reveals. What followed was explosive growth: “From then we’ve been growing several hundred percent per year. Last year we grew 300%. This year we’re hoping to grow still more than 200%.”
The Enterprise Sales Spectrum
What makes Corti’s growth particularly interesting is the diversity of their customer base. “We sell it to entire governments,” Andreas explains. “We’re lucky to cover for one all of Sweden’s medical emergency hotlines. Massive responsibility we’re really proud of. We have other European countries we’re soon announcing also in Southeast Asia.”
Yet they maintain this growth while serving both ends of the market: “We also work with quite small agencies and payer providers. So we have a quite big spanning customer base.”
The Subscription Model Innovation
Corti’s pricing model reflects deep understanding of healthcare operations. As Andreas describes: “If you want Corti, you add Corti. Like you pay an employee, you pay us per consultation, we join and you pay us the more you want us to do in that consultation.”
This scalable approach offers flexibility:
- Basic decision support features
- Infrastructural workflow support
- Automated insurance company member engagements
The Reality of Enterprise Sales Cycles
Perhaps most valuable for other founders is Corti’s candid look at enterprise sales timelines:
- Building relationships and signing deals: 6-8 months
- Implementation: Up to 9 months
- European government deals: Up to one year end-to-end
- Fastest deals: 90 days from start to finish
“Some of our deals are quite long, some of our deals take 90 days to roll out and that’s sort of part of the complexity we work in,” Andreas notes.
Geographic Distribution Strategy
While Corti has global ambitions, they’ve taken a deliberate approach to market expansion. “Our customer base today is mostly in the US and that’s deliberately because we are a language company,” Andreas explains. The decision stems from practical considerations about AI development: “We had to pick a language that we knew there would be a lot of language resources on.”
The results speak for themselves: “I think 80, 85% of our customers today are US based.”
Beyond Traditional Metrics
What’s particularly notable about Corti’s growth is how they’ve achieved it while maintaining high standards for impact. They don’t just track revenue growth—they measure success through patient outcomes. “When they tell their story about why it made sense to join us, they can always tell a story about how a patient got impacted,” Andreas shares. “And that just rocks my world every time I hear it.”
Lessons for Deep Tech Founders
Corti’s growth story offers several key insights for other deep tech startups:
- Clinical validation before market entry can set the foundation for rapid growth
- Flexible pricing models that align with customer operations can accelerate adoption
- Geographic focus based on technical requirements can be more effective than broad expansion
- Long sales cycles don’t preclude explosive growth
- Impact metrics can coexist with aggressive growth targets
For deep tech founders, particularly in healthcare, Corti’s journey demonstrates that building a high-growth business doesn’t require sacrificing either technical excellence or mission impact. It’s possible to achieve both—if you’re willing to invest the time in getting the foundations right.