Braid Health

Here is a fact that should bother more people than it does: two radiologists can look at the same MRI and disagree. Not because one of them is bad at the job, but because reading medical images is hard, subjective work done under time pressure, often by whoever happens to be on call. If your scan gets read at a small clinic on a busy night, you get one answer. If it goes to a teaching hospital, you might get a different one. The image is identical. The stakes are your body. And most patients never find out there was a second answer to have.

Braid Health is a San Francisco company built around that gap. Founded in 2018, it makes an FDA-cleared platform that pairs AI imaging copilots with board-certified radiologists to read MRI, CT, ultrasound and X-ray studies. The pitch is not "AI will replace your radiologist," which is the kind of thing that gets a healthcare startup into trouble with regulators and doctors alike. The pitch is closer to: the AI does the tedious parts, the human does the judgment, and the whole thing runs on software that doesn't feel like it was designed in 2004.

That last part matters more than it sounds, because of who built it. The founders, Kevin Quennesson and Alessandro Sabatelli, are Apple and Twitter alumni - people who worked on the first iPhone app, foundational iPhone and iPad tools, Siri, and the Apple Watch. Quennesson later built Cortex, Twitter's centralized AI group. When engineers with that resume look at radiology, they don't see a medical problem first. They see a workflow problem: files in the wrong format, results trapped in fax machines, collaboration that means printing something out. Braid's core product is, at heart, an attempt to make that workflow feel like consumer software.

The company got its FDA clearance and closed its money in the same year, 2020, which in healthcare is unusually brisk. Lux Capital led a combined $9 million seed and Series A round, with Rucker Park Capital and 01 Advisors - the fund started by former Twitter chiefs Dick Costolo and Adam Bain - also in. The bet those investors made was not on a moonshot. It was on a small team shipping a real, cleared product into a market where "real" and "cleared" are the two hardest words.

What Braid actually sells has two faces. One face is B2B: urgent care networks, health systems and retail clinics use the platform to read and collaborate on imaging in real time. Carbon Health, the urgent-care chain, runs its diagnostic imaging results on Braid. The other face, newer, is direct-to-patient, and it is the part most likely to make you raise an eyebrow at the price.

In 2026 the company launched a radiologist second-opinion service that costs $199. You upload your DICOM files - the raw imaging data, not a screenshot - and a board-certified radiologist does what Braid calls a "sequence by sequence re-read," then sends back a written opinion with annotated findings, a comparison to any prior imaging, and a plain summary. No referral. The comparison Braid draws is stark: a traditional in-person second opinion runs $500 to $1,500 and requires a new referral. Braid's costs less than a decent pair of shoes and requires an internet connection.

You can be skeptical of any healthcare company's own numbers, and you should be. But the shape of what Braid is doing is legible: take something that was expensive, slow and gatekept - a second look at your scan by an expert - and make it cheap, fast and self-serve. The company says more than 650,000 people have used the platform to, in its words, "get peace of mind through better diagnostics." Peace of mind is a genuinely strange thing to put a price on. Braid put it at $199.