Amit Vasudev

Are you chasing ARR or ACR (Annual Curiosity Revenue)? Mike Desjadon, CEO of Anomaly (healthcare payments platform), called this out in our most recent episode of The Health Tech Front Lines: "I see a lot of strategies at early companies racing out to get what I would call not ARR, but jokingly I'd call it ACR - Annual Curiosity Revenue. Everyone's curious about AI. You think you could bite off a piece of problem? Sure. I'll give you a shot for a year." The contracts are designed to be easy exits. No skin in the game. Churn is inevitable. Mike told me he's doing the opposite - building sticky, deep relationships instead: → 1-6 anchor customers (not 100 curiosity deals that churn) → Forward deploys engineers into customer success to prove real value → Accepts 14-month sales cycles instead of rushing surface-level wins → Focuses on customer expansion within existing accounts Healthcare (like every industry) is drowning in AI logos chasing curiosity budgets. The winners will prove unimpeachable value first. Full link to ep in the comments

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Key risks to consider: 1) The ambient scribe market is very competitive, which could lead to pricing pressure, 2) The pace of technology innovation is rapidly evolving and could require increased investment that inhibits the ability to deliver attractive margins and cash flow, 3) EHR vendors exert strong influence and could have an advantage on platform sales, 4) Many health systems operate with low margins and could be under pressure from cuts to government funded programs, impacting their ability to invest in IT, 5) Payors are deploying AI tools in utilization management and documentation review, which could limit the benefits that accrue to providers.

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Distribution is becoming the moat in healthcare AI Anthropic’s recent Claude for Healthcare update was a good example: the main features were not focused on model performance, it was connectivity, making Claude usable inside the healthcare enterprise stack. The main drops were: -> Coverage rules (CMS Coverage Database connector): check whether a treatment is reimbursable and under what conditions -> Coding (ICD-10 connector): translate clinical language into billing/diagnosis codes -> Provider verification (NPI Registry connector): validate provider identity for credentialing and claims -> Prior Authorization Agent: assemble documentation and rationale for approvals/appeals -> Interoperability tooling: make it easier to plug into health IT systems This shift creates real opportunity for founders. Healthcare is fragmented by country, system, and workflow, so teams that can embed applications deeply in specific workflows can build meaningful markets, even from narrow starting points. Source: https://lnkd.in/dFEi8UDP

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Healthcare and life sciences remain one of the most operationally complex and highly regulated industries in the economy. At Ardan, we believe agentic AI will create meaningful value where repetitive, rules-based systems can be dynamically automated while maintaining appropriate accuracy, oversight and governance. #healthcaretechnology #ai #privateequity

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Nice quote from one of our Partners Andrew Brackin in TechCrunch: “This was one of the biggest use cases of ChatGPT,” Andrew Brackin, a partner at Gradient who invests in health tech, told TechCrunch. “So it makes a lot of sense that they would want to build a more kind of private, secure, optimized version of ChatGPT for these healthcare questions.” https://lnkd.in/gY3TV5VD

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