Nicolas Abad

Abad grew up surrounded by medicine without practicing it. Four of his five closest people wear white coats - his father, his sister, his grandfather, his godmother. He went the other way, into business and Latin American startups, with stints connected to companies like Frubana and Neta. Medicine was the family language; he just spoke it as a second tongue.

Then late 2022 took the floor out from under him. Inside a short, brutal stretch, he lost his father, the company he'd been building, and a relationship. The grief did something unusual. Instead of retreating, he turned toward the exact field that had just broken his heart and got obsessed with it.

Enter Tomas Giraldo, a childhood friend from Medellin and a physician. Giraldo sent the best condolence message Abad received. The two reconnected over a shared fixation on what modern medicine could and couldn't do. They began trading research papers daily, then building small prototypes on the side - the kind of nights-and-weekends tinkering that rarely amounts to anything and occasionally amounts to everything.

By 2023 Abad was at Stanford for an MBA, and the side project had quietly become the main thing. The two friends became co-founders. The thesis was simple and stubborn: Latin America does not have enough doctors, and the ones it has are drowning in paperwork. You cannot mint physicians fast enough to close that gap. So build something that gives the existing ones their hours back.

Strip away the funding headlines and Abad is making one tidy argument over and over. Healthcare in much of the world runs on scarcity - too few doctors, too many patients, too much of a physician's day eaten by documentation and bureaucracy. The usual answer is to train more doctors, which takes a decade and money the region doesn't have. Abad's answer is to make each existing doctor able to do more, by handing the boring, repetitive, error-prone parts of the job to software that never gets tired.

That is why he is careful with the word "replace." The AI Doctor augments the clinician; it does not stand in for one. The whole pitch collapses if patients feel handed off to a machine, and Abad knows it. The product is framed as a "second brain for the doctor" - a co-pilot that remembers everything, reads fast, and never skips a guideline, so the human can do the part machines are bad at: looking another person in the eye and caring.

It helps that medicine is the family business. Four of his five closest people are physicians, which means Abad has spent his life listening to doctors complain about exactly the friction Telepatia attacks. He isn't an outsider guessing at the workflow. He grew up at the dinner table where it was described in detail, then spent a year trading research papers with a physician co-founder until he understood it cold.

And then there is the goal that makes investors lean forward and skeptics roll their eyes in equal measure. Abad wants Latin America's first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984. He arrives at it through math, not romance: deploy enough "AI interns" per oncologist, push early screening and prevention hard enough, shave cancer mortality by ten percent, and the prize stops being a fantasy and becomes a number you can audit. Whether or not the medal ever arrives, the framing tells you how he thinks - in measurable outcomes, with the ambition dialed all the way up.