Jan 3, 2022

Forbes W hile he was practicing as a neurosurgeon in the U.K., Dr. Chris Mansi saw firsthand how surgery could go well, yet the patient would die anyway because too much time had passed before getting him to the operating room. In 2016, while working on an M.B.A. at Stanford Business School, he met David Golan, an Israeli machine-learning postdoc who’d recently been discharged from the hospital after a suspected stroke. The two bonded over the lack of data available to drive better medical decisions and pitched their idea to improve stroke care in a class run by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who offered seed funding through his firm Innovation Endeavors. San Francisco-based Viz.ai uses artificial intelligence to speed up care. Its software cross-references CT images of a patient’s brain with its database of scans to find early signs of large vessel occlusion strokes. It then alerts doctors, who can see the images on their phones, cutting hours off the time it would otherwise take to get that patient into surgery. “We started in stroke, where every minute counts,” says Mansi, the company’s 36-year-old CEO. “We have an expression: ‘Time is brain,’ because in a stroke every one minute translates to 2 million brain cells that die and every one minute of delay translates to an extra week of disability.” The company, which made the cut for Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list in 2021, has raised $150 million from investors that include Insight Partners, Kleiner Perkins and Scale Venture Partners. Revenue reached an estimated $12 million last year. The company has signed on more than 900 hospitals, including the Cleveland Clinic, Mount Sinai and Geisinger. It also became the rare AI technology approved by Medicare. Viz.ai is now expanding from strokes to pulmonary embolisms and aortic dissections—and Mansi sees the potential for AI to dramatically improve the quality of care that patients receive. “The biggest misconception about AI is that it might replace people’s jobs in healthcare,” he says. “Those of us in healthcare know just how complicated healthcare is. AI is there to assist.” Follow me on  Twitter  or  LinkedIn . Send me a secure  tip .