Dr. Munjal Shroff’s wife started experiencing unexplained symptoms in the fall of 2025: rashes, itching, fatigue, and swollen lymph nodes. After consulting with multiple doctors and extensive testing, they struggled to get a diagnosis.
Shroff, a psychiatrist based in Atlanta, said he needed something to help keep track of everything and searched for a healthcare-specific AI tool. He found Healz AI, a healthcare AI assistant, and signed up.
The app turned out to be a crucial resource. It encouraged them to seek another opinion that ultimately led to her diagnosis: rare T-cell lymphoma. After relying on the app throughout her treatment, Shroff believed in it so much that he became an investor.
“I think without it, the diagnosis and treatment would’ve been delayed,” he said.
The app, which launched in beta last year, is a chatbot designed to help cancer patients navigate their diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. The early-stage startup is backed by Recursive Superintelligence cofounder Alexey Dosovitskiy, the company exclusively told Business Insider.
Dosovitskiy is a former Google researcher who authored a breakthrough paper on computer vision in 2020. Recursive, a self-improving AI startup founded by a group of researchers around the start of the year, has raised over $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation.
Dosovitskiy said he invested in Healz because healthcare is an area where AI can make a big difference by improving and saving lives.
“Now is the time to work on this: the underlying technology is largely there, and it needs to be made into products that help people,” he told Business Insider in an email.
The AI pushed him to seek another opinion
Shroff said he’d used general AI tools but that he wanted something specific to healthcare. When he started using Healz, his wife’s doctors suspected an autoimmune condition, such as lupus, was the more likely diagnosis, but that cancer was a possibility. Healz agreed and did not immediately conclude she had cancer.
Instead, it recommended she get an opinion from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. That decision is what finally got her a diagnosis. Healz also pointed Shroff toward a specific specialist at MD Anderson for her treatment.
Shroff said his wife’s local doctors were helpful and that he thinks they would’ve eventually gotten another opinion that led to the right diagnosis, even without the AI. But he said Healz encouraged them to advocate for it sooner and helped avoid additional delays and uncertainty.
“I think that pivot of getting the second opinion from MD Anderson was just absolutely crucial,” he said. “I think it ultimately could have potentially happened, but it would’ve taken much longer.”
Igor Demishev and Alex Plat, founders and co-CEOs of Healz, said their app is meant to supplement, not replace, human doctors. They said Healz can help patients understand their diagnosis, find oncologists, interpret scans and tests, and navigate treatment and recovery.
Demishev and Plat said they focused on cancer because it affects so many people and often involves complex cases. They were also motivated by personal reasons — several people in Demishev’s family have had cancer. “We are working with people who have insanely hard stories,” Plat said, adding they saw a need for a more specialized AI tool.
Healz does not have its own foundation model but instead uses existing models layered with its own memory system, workflows, and other technologies. The founders said the memory system of their AI is designed to digest and store large volumes of documents and medical files, adding that one user has uploaded 1,500 documents.
Healz is also designed to avoid common pitfalls of AI chatbots, such as being overly agreeable. Its “root-cause mode” prompts the model to ask up to 20 follow-up questions about the user’s symptoms before drawing any conclusions or making suggestions.
He still uses Healz and invested in the company
The founders said that after the initial limited launch, recurring revenue doubled each month from June to August, bringing its annual recurring revenue — the amount a company expects to collect over a year from subscriptions — to $100,000 as of early September.
The current Healz user base is 97% patients with cancer. Some of the remaining users are doctors who use it as a reference tool, the founders said. They also said most users engage with the app daily or weekly and that their month-to-month user retention was 70%.
After the diagnosis, Shroff and his wife continued using Healz. He said he consulted with the AI to weigh different chemotherapy options, and it suggested one that he should ask her doctor about. The doctor agreed it was the right course of action. Shroff said the doctor may have recommended it regardless, but that because of Healz, he felt more prepared going into the appointment and more reassured in the decision.
“I think it builds comfort,” Shroff said of instances when the doctor’s and AI’s recommendations aligned.
After months of being a heavy user of the platform, Shroff decided to become an investor as well. Demishev and Plat said Healz is planning additional fundraising in the coming months.
Shroff said there are limitations with the AI and that it has occasionally been off on some specifics regarding her treatment and monitoring. That’s why, he said, it’s crucial to use it in conjunction with human doctors who can actually see firsthand what’s going on.
Shroff’s wife is still in treatment, and he continues to rely on Healz. He thinks that for patients or their loved ones who don’t have medical training, the AI would be even more valuable.
“It’s so easy to get lost in being a patient,” he said, adding, “It’s been an indispensable tool.”
Read the full article here
