What if you had the world’s best doctor by your side for life? A doctor who is always available, extremely knowledgeable, and completely personalized to you.
Right now, our healthcare system looks nothing like that vision. Today, over 100 million people in the U.S. don’t have a dedicated doctor, and even those who do often wait weeks to see them. Our healthcare system is designed to ration access to our scarcest resource – doctor time. And in a world where clinician capacity is scarce, people are forced to turn to Google or ChatGPT for answers. LLM performance on medical reasoning tasks are nothing short of amazing, but information alone only leads to the “so what, now what?” problem. Consumers ultimately need clinical resolution: the prescription, the lab test, the specialist appointment, the follow-up, the ongoing guidance and encouragement to change their lifestyle.
So what would healthcare abundance look like in the age of AI? It would look like Counsel Health. Counsel is a full-stack, AI native medical group that makes medical care abundant – unlimited guidance from real doctors, scaled by Counsel’s medical AI. This system embodies several qualities that everyone should expect from AI as a new site of care, which go far beyond the simplistic, early models of digital health that simply replicated offline visits on a computer screen:
- Always available (and actionable): Care when you need it, not weeks later. By making doctors the true front door to care, Counsel prevents the typical swirl that occurs when we gate access to physicians. And as a licensed medical provider, Counsel provides real clinical action – not just information, but prescriptions, lab tests, referrals, and follow-ups.
- Extremely knowledgeable: Medical knowledge doubles every few months, and every day patients generate torrents of data from labs, imaging, and wearables. No human can keep up. That’s why medicine is fragmented into specialties – cardiology, oncology, endocrinology, so on. But patients don’t care about specialties; they just want answers. Counsel’s AI spans the entire corpus of medical knowledge, across every discipline, and brings it straight to the point of care.
- Completely personalized: Counsel’s AI remembers – it maintains context across every interaction, building a data flywheel for more personalization over time. As clinicians validate and reinforce the AI recommendations, Counsel steadily makes more of its interactions autonomous. Like driverless cars, the shift from copilot to autopilot will happen slowly, then all at once.
Counsel is led by Dr. Muthu Alagappan, who has lived at the intersection of AI, medicine, and healthtech for more than a decade. Previously a Stanford-trained physician, AI researcher, and chief medical officer at a high-growth healthtech company, he combines deep clinical expertise with a builder’s intuition for how to redesign care models in the age of AI.
We led Counsel’s seed financing because of our conviction in this bold idea: that we can build a world in which everyone has their own doctor for life. In the months since, the company has made immense progress toward that future – showing strong market adoption, exciting technical progress, and sound clinical rigor on the path to the “perfect doctor.” They’re already scaling physician-patient coverage ratios to levels we’ve never seen before, and tapping into both existing and emerging payment rails to wrap it all in a durable business model.
That’s why we’re thrilled to double down on Counsel Health and co-lead their Series A, along with our friends at Google Ventures. Counsel is redefining what it means to access healthcare: no longer scarce, but abundant.
