Founder spotlight: Vera Health’s co-founders on launching early and failing often

Maxime Allouch and Taieb Bennani’s first ever conversation was about eye fungus. The two met over coffee a week before starting a data science grad program at MIT, when Taieb brought up a project he was working on: using fungus images to build a predictive model that helped his father, a retinologist, assess the severity of a type of diabetes in his patients’ eyes. “Most people get bored when I tell that story,” he said. But as it turns out, Maxime was building a similar model for his father’s specialty (orthodontics). 

Taieb and Maxime bonded over childhoods watching their physician parents spend long, stressful nights poring through thick books of medical literature trying to solve complicated cases. Eager to find a more efficient way to help doctors help their patients, they started collaborating, combining their passion for healthcare and machine learning to crush hackathons and eventually co-found Vera Health. 

Vera Health uses AI to give healthcare providers immediate access to evidence-based medical knowledge whenever needed. Their solution, now backed by Y Combinator, scans more than 60 million scientific papers, a drug database curated by the American Society of Health Pharmacists, patient charts, and customized hospital guidelines to offer instant medical expertise to physicians, nurses, physician assistants, and other clinicians caring for patients. 

While Taieb and Maxime’s model is free and accessible to all healthcare providers across specialties, its stickiest early adopters have been emergency room clinicians, who’ve leaned on Vera’s support to make fast, confident, evidence-based medical decisions. 

Rippling recently caught up with Taieb and Maxime to discuss their journey from classmates to co-founders, where the duo revealed the three pivotal decisions that led to early customer traction

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Tip #1: Launch before you’re ready

Maxime: The main thing we’ve learned in our startup journey so far is to launch early, fail often, and keep doing it again. Y Combinator says this over and over, but when you actually live it, you understand why they keep repeating it. We were never going to be satisfied with our earliest product, but launching it was the best thing we did. We got early traction, which allowed us to iterate much quicker into the more polished product we have now.

Tip #2: Shadow your customers

Taieb: In the very early days, we created an advisory board of eight physicians. We ask a lot of questions and do discovery calls trying to understand how healthcare providers could use a tool like Vera. But nothing beats actually going to the emergency room, following physicians around, and seeing their typical workday firsthand.

Being close to your customers gives you the kind of agility big companies don’t have. That’s how startups can create an edge and be a real differentiator. You can spend hours, days, weeks building what you think is the best product, then you put it in your users’ hands and realize you need to adapt as quickly as possible.

Tip #3: Ask for negative feedback

Taieb: We were naive about this in the early days, but if you have a good relationship with customers, they only tell you the good things about your company and about your product. One tactic we've used is to ask customers to be as brutally honest as possible in only giving us the most negative feedback they can. Emphasizing what doesn’t work is what really helps you.

What’s next for Vera Health?

Maxime: Right now,  we're really focused on building the best possible experience for healthcare providers to access and use medical knowledge at the point of care. Which means we are hiring across engineering, product and growth. Specifically, we are looking for talented folks at the intersection of AI and healthcare.

We're working on frontier problems, like evaluating clinical language learning models and how to build complex agentic workflows in the clinical setting. As we get more buzz and focus on our sales motion, we’re looking to build out our technical team to keep developing products.