From Fortune 500 to founder: The YC startup that’s helping overburdened doctors

Dot Koh / Screengrab from video by Stanford Biodesign

Doctors need more help. Realizing this need, Dot Koh left a career in Fortune 500 healthcare companies to start Bot MD, an AI-powered assistant that answers clinical questions, transcribes patient notes, and serves as a medical calculator.

Tech in Asia spoke to her about her new life as a medtech founder in Singapore. She also talked about her recent experience with Y Combinator’s (YC) Summer 2018 cohort, in which she received the standard US$120,000 investment.

What is your background?

I am trained as a biomedical engineer. I did my undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and economics at Northwestern University and my masters in bioengineering at Stanford University. I spent a year at an innovation fellowship program called Stanford Biodesign which really changed my perspective on design, innovation, and entrepreneurship. It set me on a path to want to impact healthcare through technology and innovation.

What inspired Bot MD?

I have spent the majority of the last decade living and working in large emerging markets (China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines) across several Fortune 500 healthcare companies. I saw how stretched doctors are because of the size of the population and the lack of support and infrastructure. This motivated me to want to solve this issue.

Medical knowledge and expertise already exist in many large specialty hospitals in urban cities, and it is all about spreading this know-how across markets in a highly scalable way. This is why we developed Bot MD – to assist clinicians and make their lives better and easier.

How did you meet your co-founder?

Through a mutual friend – I was looking for someone with an expertise in natural language processing and machine learning. Singapore is a tiny, tiny place, so generally when you ask around, you should be able to find folks in this space. Yanchuan and I had lunch at a Tonkatsu place in Chijmes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

What gets you out of bed every day?

My personal goal is to impact the lives of 100 million patients by the age of 40. What motivates me to get out of bed each morning is trying to get there as quickly as possible.

Run us through a typical day in your life.

Whenever I don’t have meetings, I am either designing the UI/UX for the next iteration of our app, coding content for the hospitals and partners that we have, and dealing with administrative issues – employment passes, figuring out office spaces, and hiring.