The following interview is a conversation we had with Elad Ferber, CEO of Synthpop, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $8M Raised to Build the Future of Healthcare Administration with AI
Brett
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Elad Ferber, CEO & Co-Founder of Synthpop, a healthcare technology company that’s raised over 8 million in funding. Lad, how are you?
Elad Ferber
I’m doing very well, Brett. Thanks for having me on.
Brett
No problem. Super excited for our conversation here, and let’s go ahead and jump right in. Talk to us about what you’re building today.
Elad Ferber
So, what we’re building at Synthpop is really a system of composable intelligence. Unpack what that means. But it’s artificial intelligence agents and capabilities for back office functions in healthcare. Because, you know, I’ve been in healthcare for the past ten plus years, and I really believe there is a real opportunity to transform healthcare through administration. Actually, clinical takes time. There’s a lot of barriers there we can talk about. But I think the way to deliver better care, faster care, more affordable care, which we definitely need in our country, is through innovations and AI, and apply to administration and back office functions in healthcare. I think that’s the biggest opportunity right now, and that’s what we do.
Brett
So you said ten years in healthcare. Was that always like, this master plan? Like, when you’re young, did you want to go into healthcare? Or where did that entry point begin?
Elad Ferber
I was working in aerospace for the previous ten years, and I actually. I always thought that it would be really fun to kind of change things up a little bit. And I was thinking, what could I do? Bring the most impact, can help me lead the most impactful life. And I think healthcare was definitely on the top of the list. And I wanted to just dedicate, you know, can choose what we dedicate our time in this life for and I thought that could be actually a pretty worthy endeavor.
Brett
As you started to dive into healthcare, what’s a surprising, like, fact or thing that you’ve learned that, you know, people like me who aren’t in healthcare would be like, no, I don’t believe that. Like, how can that possibly be the case? Have you encountered anything like that just kind of blows your mind?
Elad Ferber
Yeah. Well, when we built our first company, Spry Health, it was, I was maybe personally naive about the american healthcare system. I just moved from Israel in 2012, and I was thinking, yeah, I’m going to build this amazing healthcare company and we’re going to show we can make an impact on patients lives and we can save money, and they’ll come like, everybody’s going to use it. It’s going to be amazing. And it just was so hard to get alignment from all stakeholders. Like, value based care is almost like, it’s so hard to make it work with solutions that drive outcomes, especially if those outcomes take a long time. And I think that was a realization. I’ve had a, over the eight years that, you know, leading spraft, and then we sold it.
Elad Ferber
And also through those years of commercializing that technology, it was just astounding to see that even if you build a great product, it’s just not trivial, and the stakeholders are not always aligned with implementing it.
Brett
As you moved into building your second healthcare company, what was the big lesson that you walked away from with that first company?
Elad Ferber
I was just thinking, you know, Jan and I, my Co-Founder, Jan and I were thinking, how can we build the fastest growing healthcare company? What does that look like? And I was banging my head against the wall for years with trying to sell to big health systems and to payers, and the sales cycles were long and you had to do a pilot. And then, you know, after the pilot, you need to do a study. And then, you know, it takes 18 months to even get a pilot up and running sometimes. And I was really thinking hard, okay, which verticals, who to sell, what to sell, how to position it in order to really try to have SaaS like growth in healthcare. Is that even possible?
Elad Ferber
So that’s maybe the biggest learning I’ve had from my time in surprise, kind of how to thread the needle in a way that will allow that to happen.
Brett
How’s it going? Did that happen?
Elad Ferber
Well, it’s. It’s been growing, going incredible. You know, six months in, we sold our first product, and we had a first patient that gained value and had faster care delivered because of our agents. Now we’re like 17 months in, not even a year and a half, and we’re seeing hockey stick like traction. So we’re nationwide with a few vendors, category leaders. We’ve seen over a million tasks our agents reason through. We passed a million mark just last month. So, like, it’s been incredible. I think it’s true. And we see that also in other verticals in back office functions. Once you prove that the AI can actually do the work, the adoption is just like, okay, yeah, let’s just do that with AI from now. And that’s what we’re seeing, and it’s just fascinating to witness and to experience.
Brett
I’ve spoken to a lot of healthcare founders that’s not very common, to have value being added within six months. What did you get right there? How did you make that happen? Like, the normal timeframes that I hear are like 24 months plus. How did you do it in six months?
Elad Ferber
So it was all about engineering, that fastest growing healthcare company thing, and we’re still trying to achieve that. Of course, we’re far from it, but it’s a worthy moon to shoot for. So I think one of the key, so there’s actually two key things that happened. One is I spent some time before starting the company as an Eir in a venture fund, helping create a thesis around using pharma data and AI to accelerate go to market in a few pharma use cases. And through that journey, I got to interview like 80 clinicians over various verticals in healthcare. And on top of that, I’ve had my own, like, back then, like, it was ten years of experience in healthcare, delivering products.
Elad Ferber
So I had that really great Bird’s eye view opportunity right when like chat, GPT became like a thing, and all of those LLM opportunities are unlocked. So it’s, I was very lucky, that’s one thing that happened for me. So I could actually try to thread the needle and I had enough information and I could see some, add some visibility. I think the other thing is, I promised myself and Jan and investors who back then already, we had investors lined up saying, hey, we will fund you in your next company. We almost don’t care what you want to build, we believe you can do it. And so whenever you want to check, here’s your, and here’s your terms. If you want it, come and get it. Which was fantastic.
Elad Ferber
But my answer to those investors were, until I have a paying customer, I’m not going to take that money. And so when we launched it, we founded the company and incorporated after we’ve had our first few customers lined up. And so we knew that what the product that will drive value is, of course, today is like, add a few iterations. But I think we knew what we wanted to sell. We knew what we wanted to build. We knew what the core capabilities are. And that’s how we got started.
Brett
Talk to us about the category you had mentioned. Category there. You’re a category leader. What’s the category?
Elad Ferber
Yeah, so there’s a few categories that we operate in. One of them is durable medical equipment. One of them is diagnostic testing facilities, fertility, wound care, home care, home health. These are, we are active today in. But there are a few other categories that are really interesting as well. And I think what’s unique about some of those customers, some of those opportunities, is that there is a high level of consolidation happening in those verticals. So people are very operationally minded. They want to get better financial results. There is a lot of care happening, and it’s care that’s happening outside of the traditional health systems. And traditional health systems, they have, they’re slow to, slower to adopt new technologies because they just have so many barriers to adopting innovation on top of them from regulatory and their internal structure and decision making process, et cetera.
Elad Ferber
But I think those verticals are less encumbered in healthcare, and we wanted to target those first. And so, yeah, were able to very quickly focus, know where to focus, create a value proposition, and really go all in. And we’re deploying into more categories, new categories now. So we’re trying to expand as quickly as possible, because the opportunity is just unprecedented, I would say.
Brett
And what’s the software category there, though? Is it back office? What is the software category?
Elad Ferber
So we actually say to our customers and to everyone who would listen that we don’t sell software, we sell labor. It’s not the same category of expense for our customers, because when you delegate a task to one of our agents, you don’t need to do it, and you don’t need to do it anymore. So if you have, for example, some of the tasks we have, we place a phone call to a payer, and we wait on the line for an hour until somebody picks up, and we navigate the phone tree. And then we ask, okay, hey, we have this patient. They’re about to get services in our clinic. What are their, what is their financial responsibility? What’s their out of pocket? Is it covered? Does it require prior authorization? If so, we can submit it. Our agents do the whole thing.
Elad Ferber
If we miss even one thing, and of course, we analyze transcription afterwards. We know we don’t charge our customer at all. So we charge if we, if you don’t need touch that anymore and you have a fully pristine record of what was said, of the reference number, of the confirmation number from the insurer, of all of the dollar signs that the patient needs to know to make a decision, like, we automate that, we take it away from you or you don’t pay us. And I think that’s why you treat us as a customer, like an employee or like a contractor. Right? So, and it saves work. So it saves real work. It’s not like a Yemenite SaaS product per se.
Brett
You know, every time I interact with the healthcare industry, I just walk away frustrated. Yeah. This is speaking as, like a consumer, as a patient, and it’s, like, hard to just not think sometimes, like, it’s fucked and it can’t be fixed. That’s like, how it feels, at least. Cause, like, it’s just not gotten any better. Like, if anything, it feels like it’s getting worse and worse. Like, why is it so broken? And then, like, what gives you hope that it’s gonna get any better? Like, for people like me? Because I think there are a lot of people out there who kind of have that same sentiment. It like, how should we be thinking about this? Why should we be hopeful as well, right?
Elad Ferber
I mean, I’m not sure I have all the answers, because I see it only from my little vantage point. Right. If you ask the same question to someone like, you know, Mario Schlosser from Oscar, or, you know, other entrepreneurs with different vantage points on the industry, you’ll get different answers. I think what I seeddenne trying to deploy some of those medical technologies out there and help patients, and also now trying to help patients with better care. I see, like, a few major issues on the administrative side. So, number one is the process to get from a referral of a patient. Let’s say you’re being referred to a surgical center to have a operation, or you’re being referred to a durable medical equipment to get a wheelchair. The process is reasonably opaque.
Elad Ferber
Whether you, as a patient, you are even eligible for that service, whether the provider is going to get paid, how much is it going to be out of pocket? And because money is so important, I mean, everybody needs to get paid. I mean, that’s their lifeblood, and I respect that a lot. Right. It’s not, you know, beyond the cynical, I think everyone needs to get paid for their work and that has to flow. But that just so complex. And so order to cash what we call in our kind of little turf that can take 200 days. That’s insane. So imagine just the financing and the overhead that the providers need to roll with. They need to suffer that, and that hurts their margin significantly and makes it harder for them to operate on the patient because of that.
Elad Ferber
There’s now onus of like, oh, you need to wait. You need to wait until I figure this out. And you know what? We’ll call you. Wait for our phone call to schedule, like, your appointment. Like, it’s ridiculous. Imagine if you can automate all of that. Like, in a minute, you’re being referred from your physician. You’re in your. In your clinic with your PCP, and they say, hey, Brett, I think you’re clinically. It’s clinically reasonable for you to have this treatment a minute later. Everything checked out already, and all the paperwork has been filed. Everything has been magically transformed. There’s so much logic. There’s, like, maybe 100 little tasks that our agents can do to make it, but they can make it so quickly versus humans transitioning. And, you know, you have stacks of paper, literally, like, changing hands.
Elad Ferber
You can make the decision as a patient right there. And so. And we can get you scheduled already. So this is a huge difference. The provider can get paid, or at least has the confidence that they’ll get paid. And we already filed a claim with your insurance. Like, so all of that can be so much quicker, and that adds so many downstream effects. So one downstream effect is this order to cash number, like, 200 days can be much shorter. Providers can get paid quicker. Their margins look nicer. It’s easier for them to operate. They can provide better care. Number two is a lot of the times when your PCP sends you to a treatment somewhere else, something is missing. That’s one of the biggest things.
Elad Ferber
Like, the clean order rate that we see is, like 50% because the providers don’t always know exactly what documents the insurance provider would want to see. And so if it’s instant and immediately they get feedback. Hey, you forgot this piece of paper. When Brett is still in the office. Oh, Brett’s file is still open in front of me. I can actually fix it immediately. Whereas if it comes in two weeks later, it’s like, oh, who? Brett? Okay, let me pull them up whenever I have time at the end of the day. So if this, like, instantaneous flow that we can unlock has really interesting downstream effects that we start seeing now with our customers that make the patient care eventually so much better. I think that’s one of the key issues that we see across the industry.
Elad Ferber
But that’s, again, from my vantage point, I think there’s so much to fix, right. But this is one place where I think it can make a difference.
Brett
I’ll have all the answers someday because I ask every healthcare Founder that I bring on that question. So someday I need to go and like pull that together and put it into an article because it’s a. I think it’s interesting to hear from those, you know, different perspectives. Let’s switch gears now. Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. So what was the marketing strategy that you’ve been running so far to get to that 1 million milestone? And then how is that marketing strategy going to change as you work towards the next milestone?
Elad Ferber
That’s a great question. I think it’s important for us to be out there. So I go to conferences, my team goes to conferences because that’s where we see the providers we serve or want to serve, and that helps us just, you know, just sitting there. I was in North Carolina last month, just sitting there and having lunch with a provider. It doesn’t have to be my customer. It’s fine. I’m super interested to hear what’s going on, what’s their day to day like, to be honest, that level of interest. And if we have speaking engagements there and we help sponsor those organizations locally, that’s big for us because we want to make sure we support the provider community that we serve. I think that’s the best marketing for us, to be honest.
Elad Ferber
Things like LinkedIn Post and things like that are great too, but almost like it’s great for a different reason. I see our marketing and branding as there’s a few customers for that, or a few ICP or targets. You know, one is, of course, customers, but that I feel is best served in person and through networks and working with people who are respected in the industry. The second is our employer brand. We want to make sure we attract the best people in the business and as a company we are reputable. So that’s really important for us too. And I think number three is also making sure that we’re out there for things like financing and investors and we continue to gather interest and are riding the hype that I think is real of the AI revolution that we’re on.
Elad Ferber
So I think that’s also really important. And so the messaging we have across our platforms is kind of, that’s the idea where can it take us from here? I’m not sure, to be honest. Marketing is only as good as the business it advertises. So we’re focusing always on the kind of core metrics of our business, how we can serve our customers better. And I think that goes also, like, world of mouth. I think that’s really the best of the best way that we can create a brand as a unknown company. Maybe initially right when you start, but we’re all known healthcare executives, so we brought our networks with us, and that’s really big now.
Brett
What about the employer brand? Can you unpack that strategy for us and what that looks like?
Elad Ferber
Yeah, well, I think that will only emerge soon because so far, I apologize. We have a team of. Thank you. We have a team of, like, I think 20 now, and 100% of the team is people we knew through first degrees, me or Jan, that we worked with in the past or one of our initial founding team members. So we didn’t even have one job posting out. So I think. But from my experience at Spry, it’s really important as we want to try to scale up, we’re going to start hiring outside our networks. And because of that, I want to have, like, a track record of like, hey, we are open about what we build. If you work with us, you know, you can show your work.
Elad Ferber
It’s not going to be like some siloed in some secret somewhere, but actually it has meaning and it has impact. We want our employees to feel like they’re doing something meaningful, which they, of course, know and feel every day from the customer. But it’s another element of. Of being able to build that also. I think we are proud of what we stand for, so it helps us communicate that externally. And, yeah, all of that is really helpful when you build a company culture, I think, and our customers also, I think, align with that to a large extent.
Brett
What about positioning? Maybe we can go a little bit deeper into that. The start of the call, you had mentioned positioning. When I’ve done positioning, it’s, you know, those are hard decisions to make because it’s just kind of deciding those different paths for you. What were those different paths? And then, you know, why did you choose the path that you went down?
Elad Ferber
Yeah, it’s. It’s really hard. And by the way, I actually am not sure that we’re optimized right now. We have the right answer, but it’s so hard to break out of the noise. There’s like 50 healthcare AI companies out there probably active trying to sell our customers. Are being sometimes bombarded by requests. And we found ways to be to differentiate our services and differentiate ourselves. It’s a continuing battle because of the noise level that we live in. And it was low a year ago, but now it’s starting to kind of amp up a little bit. So I think the strategy has to evolve with that. I think that because we are very vertical or category specific within healthcare, that helps us because we can be very focused.
Elad Ferber
And so our positioning has been really around the composable aspect of our AI agents, so we’re able to meet the customer where they are. So I really believe that. And that I think we’re different from almost anyone I’ve seen in the industry in that we have an enterprise service model and we say, hey, customer, we know that AI is this new thing. We don’t expect you to bet the house on us on day one. That’s fine. But here is a composable system that can actually fit the mold that you’ve created over years of hard work with your human team, we can work alongside your team. And so if we can take the workflow that you’ve built and RaI can just follow that, you don’t need to do something new, you don’t need to change your system of record.
Elad Ferber
We can meet you where you are. That significantly lowers the barrier to entry and helps us move forward. And I think that’s really important for us to explain because I think that’s a big competitive advantage. Another point of positioning is that we are experts. Again, we’re all experienced healthcare executives. I like telling our customers, and in marketing or whatever I speak, is that if you work with our company, I’ll be the least experienced person in healthcare that you work with. You know, after ten years, it’s like fine, or ten plus years. Our customer success manager is Chip Smith. He was a CEO of a provider organization for 15 years and he sold it. And then he was an executive in a big provider organization for five years.
Elad Ferber
So, like, this is a guy who understands how your business operates from within your operational metrics, your cash flow, how you recruit and build your team, how you retain them, how much you pay to your vendors. He knows all that. He lived all that. And that’s something so deep that I think that if a person like that is your customer success manager, that’s insane. That’s such an amazing way to deliver value to a customer and build trust. And I think that goes a long way. So I think both of these at the same time, like one meeting the customer where they are but also backed by the understanding of what the customer experiences day to day in a very deep way. I think that really creates a very interesting value prop for a customer to say, you know what, I think this might work.
Elad Ferber
And it’s actually a low risk for me to try. Let’s go. And then once they understand, oh, holy crap, look at what it’s doing for us. Okay, let’s turn it on nationally. And that’s exactly what we see happen now. And so I think that’s really a magic moment that’s happening across the board.
Brett
Something you mentioned there. You know, there’s 50 plus companies in healthcare that are using AI. I probably talked to a lot of them on the show, I think at this point. And it’s not just healthcare, it’s every industry, right? Like, most of the conversations I have on this show, they’re talking about AI, they’re using AI. So my question there is like, in five years, do you think we’re going to be using that term even? Like, is that going to be part of the positioning?
Elad Ferber
No, because what does it matter? I mean, it’s almost like it doesn’t matter that it’s artificial intelligence. It doesn’t matter. It’s intelligence. It’s blocks of intelligence that are scalable, and that’s what matters. And we call it even internally, we start calling it composable intelligence. Like my Co-Founder, Jan, I mean, he taught classes at Stanford about scalable systems and large language models. And it’s really about the composability that all of a sudden you have these reasoning engines you can put in different places, and you can build this amazing chains of intelligence from that can actually get work done. That’s what it’s about, I think, across the board. And in five years, we’ll just have faster, better, cheaper models. Maybe there’ll be some big step function jump with some AGI, whatever capabilities.
Elad Ferber
To be honest, I just think that the opportunity is so big that doesn’t have to happen for the market to completely transform in five years. And I think that will be the understanding. And it’s really intelligence. The artificial is like, doesn’t matter much. It’s an extension of us.
Brett
On that idea of composable intelligence. Is that eventually going to be the category that you’re in? So if people say, you know, what does Synthpop do? Would you say, oh, we’re a composable intelligence platform? And then ideally in five years, people would be like, oh, thank God, I’ve been looking for one of those. I’ve been evaluating vendors, you’re top of the list. Like, is that the idea that you’re eventually working towards?
Elad Ferber
Yeah, totally. Because what it means is that we can actually do anything, which was kind of a scary concept to grapple with initially, because if you can do anything, can you even do one thing? Well, like, what are you? But I think the idea of composable intelligence means that we can expand to more workflows. Like, and we’re discovering that every month we have, like, a customer come to us and asks us to do something that we didn’t do before. And now we need to caution ourselves. Right? I mean, we don’t want to become like a custom shop. We want to actually demonstrate to the market, to our investors, to our shareholders that we build something that is truly scalable.
Elad Ferber
So it’s not like a consulting shop, but the fact that we’re learning about new ways to harness the core building blocks that we’ve built in some really interesting way that we didn’t think of. That’s fantastic. And that’s, I think, one of the key drivers for our growth in the last, like, I have, like, some interesting points. Like, ondez last Thursday, we onboarded a new customer. On Saturday morning, our systems crashed because of the load, because it was a new use case. All of a sudden, we see tens of thousands of requests coming to our servers. Holy crap. What’s going on? And the thing is, it was so helpful that once they started using it, all the sudden the flow is just incredible. I think that’s really.
Elad Ferber
And Jan and I were, like, texting each other on Saturday morning and, like, trying to resolve the problem. Hope, you know, a few hours later was fine. But I think it’s really interesting to see, like, you open it up and it’s the same building blocks as we’ve been using with other customers before, but now it’s used in a different way. And I think that the ability to do that and to compose it with the customer that you’re meeting is very powerful.
Brett
Now, as you reflect on this journey, what would you say has been the most important go to market decision that you’ve made so far?
Elad Ferber
Optimizing for speed when you start? Because I think it helped me align my priorities what to do, and maybe more importantly, what not to do, who to chase, and who not to chase. Just not take that meeting, don’t take that meeting, don’t go to that conference, don’t go. You know, that’s so important. And that also helps align the team about what to do and what not to do exactly that on a daily basis and how to scale our systems and what’s important. So I think really being able to kind of codify a core value is what was really helpful to kick that off. And it also a core value that aligns very well with the market and what the market is looking for in AI.
Elad Ferber
I think the market is looking for that rapid adoption as well, and that’s otherwise, it’s not truly a venture backable company. I mean, there’s talk about healthcare and how hard it is to fundraise in healthcare. It is. But is it hard to raise for a very fast growing company? No, I think across, you know, even outside of healthcare, if you can show that traction, you can show that growth, and you can show that determination and conviction to reach that, I think you can raise money. So for us, it was also a decision, are we going to be venture backed or not? And that’s not a trivial decision for a second time Founder. I mean, we could just fund it ourselves, bootstrap, continue growing the business, and maybe have, like, a lower goal. But we decided to go for the moon.
Elad Ferber
And I think, it’s been fun and. And exciting. And also aligns the team around that value of growing as fast as we can.
Brett
What is the moon? What does that look like? And this is our final question, painted picture for us. We can go as big as you want. We can go three years. We can go five years, we can go ten years. Like, whatever timeline you want to look at, you know, what does that future look like?
Elad Ferber
Yeah, I think that I see, I envision a future where healthcare is delivered in a almost real time fashion. There’s less waiting, there’s less questions, there’s less, you know, there is more care. And by the way, that unlocks also preventative care in a much better way. Like, you know, what? If I’m diagnosed with sleep apnea, I don’t need to wait for three weeks until I get a therapy. Like, I can start working on that right now. And it doesn’t take me actually also six months before I get the diagnosis. Like, I can actually shorten that timeline. So as soon as my wife tells me that I’m snoring and maybe I should look that, check that out, I can actually finish all that journey and actually change my life almost instantly instead of suffering for months or years trying to get a treatment scheduled.
Elad Ferber
Like, I’m experiencing it myself and today, like, in my healthcare journeys or whatever, they are my family. But imagine if that is so much more streamlined, even only administratively, keep the clinical where it is administratively. That’s like such an amazing future. And I think if we can be a key player of performing that I’ve done my job and I’ll be very happy about my contribution to society by then. But I think that could be. That’s really our goal. And beyond that, there are more things we’re planning. But I’ll leave that for maybe our next chat.
Brett
Yeah, we’ll save it for part two.
Elad Ferber
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Brett
Amazing. Man, this has been so much fun. Really enjoyed this conversation. Before we wrap up, if there’s any founders that are listening in, they want to follow along with you. Where should they go?
Elad Ferber
Yeah, you can dm me on LinkedIn or Twitter or reach out on our website. I’m very happy to chat with founders thinking about this space and building in this space. So thank you for the opportunity, Brett.
Brett
Thank you, man. Really appreciate it.
Elad Ferber
Fantastic. Okay. This was fun.
Brett
Yeah, man, that was an awesome conversation. I enjoyed it a lot.
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