[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today, we're speaking with Sinan, CEO and founder of Delphina, an intelligent pregnancy care platform that's raised over 10 million in funding. Sinan, how are you? >> Doing very well, thank you, Brett, excited for our conversation today. >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to it as well. Let's go ahead and just dive right in. What are you building today? >> We're building the world's first AI powered maternal health platform that's going to enable us to solve the maternal health crisis in this country. >> Take us back to the early days. Where did this idea come from? >> Well, I was an MD-PhD at Harvard, and I was actually a researcher looking at different ways to use machine learning to get ahead of complications in the health care system. And one night at 4 a.m., we had a patient come in on the obstetrics triage ward because she with felt that her babe, sorry, I'm going to run this one back. >> That works. >> Cool. So I was an MD-PhD student at Harvard, and I was researching all kinds of different ways that we can use machine learning to improve clinical outcomes. And one night on the obstetrics ward at the hospital, we had a patient come in because she felt her baby wasn't moving. And I was the medical student there trying to record the heart rate. And unfortunately, by the time that we were able to get a recording, it showed no discernible heart rate. And that moment really inspired me to take a good, hard look at the way we practice medicine for pregnant folks around the country. This was a patient who was highly adherent. She was doing exactly what her OBGYN positions had asked her to do. And yet she had this tragic outcome. And this story plays over and over in my mind, Brett, basically every day, it motivates a lot of what we do at Delphina. And one night at about 11 p.m., when I was driving my own life to the Mayo emergency room with concern for her own pregnancy, it really dawned on me that just, wow, if this is how it is for two very privileged physicians living just minutes from the world's best hospital, this is how it is for everybody in this country. And we have an obligation as physicians to create a better system of care, to get ahead of these complications and to do so equitably for moms who are suffering disproportionately. Those are black moms, native moms, squirrel moms, moms on Medicaid who don't have access to the resources they deserve to have a healthy outcome for themselves and their babies. Why does this problem exist? When you explain it like this, it just seems like it shouldn't exist, but I'm guessing it's complicated to solve. But from your perspective, why is this even a problem in 2024? It's actually quite simple at its essence. It's actually the maternal health crisis is briefing what we've shown in this country as we built the health care system to be reactive and a fee for service profit motivated health care system. You have all those incentives, you toss them in a pot for 90 years and you get the United States maternal health crisis. And COVID really opened a lot of our eyes and a lot of ways to wow, we have worse preventative health care in this country than Costa Rica, a country that spends about a sixth of what we spend on health care. And in maternal health, you look at countries like Vietnam that have better outcomes than we do on a national level. And if you look at the black population in this country, if you're a black mom, you are better off getting your maternal health care in Kenya on average than in the United States. So when you see that, you think, why is that? You know, we actually are spending more her pregnant patient while we're spending more money on patients who started out unhealthier in their pregnancy and end up way unhealthier. And we're scrambling in the 11th hour trying to react in the emergency departments, but the operating rooms where we're doing C sections. And that's when it's already too late bread. We need to be getting ahead of this in the first trimester and the second trimester, even before someone's pregnant, honestly, and supporting them from that time. And that's why other countries are doing better than us on maternal health. And that's why the US has shamefully high numbers, especially for black, native and other marginalized women. It's because we haven't done enough to support their health care throughout their lives. And we do way too little to meet them where they are in that critical first second trimester, which is why we have so many adverse outcomes and spiraling costs. Wow. Nice depressing start to the conversation. It's our reality, Brett. But the bright spot is that we and others are it's finally getting better. You know, we have a national sense of urgency now that I really don't think was there, you know, even five years ago. What's driving that urgency? Is it entrepreneurs and founders like yourself who are coming in and saying, Hey, we're going to really build solutions to solve this? Or what is that big driver that's raising awareness right now? I actually think it's a lot more in the public policy space and the public consciousness. You know, you have articles on the front page of the New York Times about it, which isn't the solution, but it makes everyone think, you know, if you're a health executive, if you lead a hospital or a health plan, if you're a center for Medicaid, Medicare services person, if you're a legislator, if you have the pulse of the country, you have a sense that maternal health is something that we as Americans now care about in a way that just no one really talked about it, you know, five years ago. So I think that sense of national urgency, where if you sit next to someone on a plane and he talked to them about maternal health, you know, if 30 or younger, there's a pretty good chance they'll, and if they're someone who can get pregnant, there's a pretty good chance they'll tell you, wow, pregnancy's so scary. I've seen all those awful maternal health stories on TikTok. I don't even want to deal with that. And we work with some Gen Z folks on our team that have told me the same thing. And so, as a physician and as a father, it's heartbreaking to hear that. But at the end of the day, what encourages me is that we're now all on the same page. We're now all leaning on that tug of war rope together, leaning on that war together. We know we're in the same boat, and we know we have to do something to fix it in kind of a more unified and encouraging way, frankly, than we saw during COVID, which was a much more politicized public health crisis. In what's your approach to solving this? What does the solution look like? Well, we have a role to play. And I say technology can be an essential part of the solution. But at the end of the day, it's going to be human beings that solve this very human crisis. And so at Delphina, what we realized is we are the only ones out there that can actually help predict these complications as early as 12, 14 weeks into the pregnancy. So we have the responsibility and the obligation to get that insight, get that life-saving insight out to OB/GYN physicians, certified nurse midwives, doulas, and their patients in order to help them take better care of those patients. So ultimately, I see our role as enabling early interventions and better continuity of care for OB/GYN providers like my wife. So they can be at the absolute top of their game. And then for our patients to deeply support them in a personalized way, having understood more about what they need, both clinically and socially. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now back to today's episode. Talk to us about the first, let's say, 90 days you found the company, what happens next? The founding of the company for Delphino is perhaps a little atypical because I wasn't a serial entrepreneur, tech guy in general. And I was a data scientist, I was a researcher. The first 90 days basically consisted of me dinking around in a Python notebook and just trying different things and saying, hey, I wonder if I could predict fetal hypoxia, which was what led to that unfortunate stillbirth that I witnessed in Mass General Hospital. I ended up starting to build predictors for other conditions that are driving the internal health crisis, like gestational diabetes and hypertensive disorders. And I called up my brother, Ali, who was at the time a software engineer at Google building machine learning models at NASA scale. And I showed him the Python notebook. And he had actually taught me to code like 15 years before. And he was like, hey, man, I think, you know, this is scientifically valid, but I think you need a CTO here. You're going to try to build this and ship it at scale. You know, we're going to have to build this into an inference engine into a real, well architected software platform. So I said, how would you like to put your job selling ads at Google and help me save some babies and moms? And so he did it and never looked back and he became our CTO. And then I called up my friend Priyanka Vadia, who at the time was at a top EEG data company called Emotive and had built amazing products for both patients or physicians and researchers. And that was exactly what we're looking for is not just an API that you can query, but a software interface that you can really deeply embed into your workflow as a physician or into your life and the way you want to experience your pregnancy as a patient. So the first 90 days, I miss a lot, Brett, because they were just wide open. It was so creative and freewheeling, you know, no real product yet, no revenue, no pressure, just open creative brainstorming, iterating very rapidly on what would really solve the problem. So I'm grateful for those days. And I do miss them in many ways. I think those are always like the most fun part of the journey or there's something about that stage of the journey I would say of like, when you're first starting something and everything is fresh, everything's new, you're not dealing with any pain yet. That's the highlight for me, at least. Exactly, exactly. It's just the sense that anything is possible. That's what I miss most. And we try to preserve that in our company culture, even as we're scaling now, we have a product with revenue. But at the end of the day, the culture of Delphina, I really want that being our DNA, even 10 years from now, and hopefully we're a massive company that's serving millions of people. I still want someone, a data scientist, an engineer, a physician, a nurse, to be able to stand up at Delphina and say, Hey, you know what? Actually, if we did a model this way, where we had a workflow this other way, we could actually save more lives. I want them to be able to have that gift of possibility the same way I had it three years ago. From the day the company was founded, until you started generating revenue, how much time passed? About two years. And then what did those first customers look like, and how do you land those first deals? I know that the first deals are always the most difficult to land. It is. And nowhere is that as true as in healthcare, where the product really, you need a product market fit at a different level. Like if you're really, there's been a lot of weird stuff in digital health and people not delivering other promise. But if you're really, you know, if you're working with Mayo Clinic, you're working with the Prospatial to Texas, we got to be delivering. We got to be able to really improve those outcomes, which is why it took us two years to really heads down, build clinically validates, scientifically validate with our partners at Mayo Clinic. That was really quite a long time. And it's really credit to our investors for seeing the future that you invest that time up front. Then in the last year, it's been off to the races, right? No shortage of health plan partners. Those are health insurance companies that see that we can do a lot better by their members. We can improve the clinical outcomes for them, while substantially saving on costs, as well as innovative health care systems that say, you know what, we can actually massively improve our ability to deliver care and achieve better quality outcomes more efficiently, solving our staffing and, you know, clinical burnout problems. So I'd say like getting to those people is never easy, but when we get in front of them and we have a message that solves what's a hair on fire plot problem for them. So we're really fortunate to work with a number of amazing health care entities around the country from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas to Mayo Clinic. And at the end of the day, you're right, getting those partners is the biggest challenge. The first people to say, well, I believe in this at the level of my wallet, my pocketbook, here's a check, you know, actually deliver for me. And at Delphina, the reason we had two years elapsed from the first inkling of the company to the first paying customer, is we spent those two years clinically validating, scientifically validating our model with Mayo Clinic and other partners. So by the time we're working with health plans like Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, they know that this is a deeply clinically sound model that should be able to deliver for them very, very substantial savings on NICU-related costs and maternal hospitalization-related costs. And I'm really grateful for those early customers that took that plunge with us, and I believe they're now experiencing the rewards of that early bet that they placed on Delphina. I don't want to make this traumatic for you, but I have to ask how many people are involved in a buying decision for something like this? I have to imagine that it's crazy. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that, Brett, because I'm at a conference and I think I might have to talk to every single person here, all thousand of them, to get that decision made. But you know, these are complex organizations, some of the organizations we work with are Fortune 5, Fortune 50, and they have a lot of stakeholders, and that's just part of the game. So I think, you know, the key is to find someone. And for us, that can be a clinical person, like a chief medical officer, it can be a data person, it can be a technology person, it can be a profit and loss leader, like a financial leader who has ownership for the bottom line. And all of those folks can and have, and will be advocates for Delphina, but the key is to find someone who is hungry, who wants to see a burning problem solved for themselves and for their organization. And at every single organization, you know, we've won some, we've lost some for now, but at the end of the day, at every organization, we've always found at least one person. Again, these are massive organizations. We found at least one person that looks at maternal health in this country and in the way it's practiced by and for their organization. And they go, no way, this is not the way that this is going to be done in 2030. I want to get ahead of this. I want my organization to be doing this differently in 2024. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. So are these early adopters then? It sounds like they're open to the idea of new technology and introducing technology to solve problems. Yeah, absolutely. I'd say we're still at the early stages, early adopter part of our bell curve. We do work with some of the largest health plans in health systems. But at the end of the day, everyone who tossed their hat in the ring in the last year is absolutely an early adopter because to your podcast title, we're defining a new category. We're the first AI powered pregnancy care platform. There's not really a CPT code or anything like that that you can easily build for something like Delphina. So it really takes a true believer of a health plan or a health system to say, yeah, I'm going to do this with you. I'm going to jump in with you and figure out a way to make this work for my members. And it gets easier and easier, right? By the time we're on our 10th health plan, it's a lot easier to figure out than we were on our first one thing I found is it's really hard to find early adopters because they normally don't list it in their LinkedIn profile or anything like that. How do you find early adopters through the network? I'd say, you know, that's the thing I've come to learn most about health care is how small the world is, how everybody knows each other. So everyone kind of knows who are the early adopters, who was the first person to do any kind of telehealth solution, who was the first person to implement AI algorithms in their own practice or in their own health plan. And so those people are, you know, sometimes they publish, sometimes they write a paper and a peer review journal about it, but that's rare. More often than not, it's we're talking to somebody who knows somebody and says, oh, yeah, yeah, I know they tried this maternal health thing in 2015. They tried a value-based contract and it didn't work because they didn't have the technology or the tools to actually improve the outcome. But I think this Delphina thing could really be for them. Let me put you in touch. And so really, that's been the main lever for growth, really, for us, fundamentally, Brad, like for a long time, we didn't even have a sales or marketing team as we're doing founder-led sales. And it was just that network effect of people hearing that this idea sounds great. Or then once it was implemented, oh, I heard they did great work in Texas. And that's been how we've continued to grow and how we plan to keep scaling in the future. What have you learned from building that marketing team and that sales team so far? We're early in our journey. We brought on our sales and marketing expert leadership in the last six months. But I've learned a lot from them. I'm not a salesperson. I'm not a marketer. But I value deeply the ability to tell a story. And what we're doing is quite challenging and quite complicated. But at the end of the day, for us to succeed, we've got to keep it simple. We've got to let every patient, regardless of her background or educational status, deeply understand and trust what we're doing. Her family, community, have to understand. And we have to earn that trust. And then our provider partners, they're very intelligent. They're very busy. They don't have time to sit there and learn all the details about every this and that about every model. What do they care about? They care about efficiency. They care about quality, care about safety. So can we speak to those aspects of Delphina in ways that are already literally reading the questions before they ask them from their minds and answering them proactively so that within 30 minutes, we have them signing up to use Delphina care, which is where we are at now. And that's not where we were a year ago. So that's all thanks to our amazing sales and really marketing team as well, where people now know what Delphina is. Obie Gynes, when you talk to them and heard of us, they've seen the studies that we publish in peer review journals they know what we're about and they know that it works. So I'd say the main thing I've learned from them is how to tell a story simply and beautifully in ways that resonate with diverse stakeholders in healthcare. And to go back there one question, you had mentioned category, which of course is one of my favorite things in the world to talk about. So how are you going about creating this category? How are you going to create demand for something that doesn't exist yet? Well, I'd say the demand is definitely there, but the idea space of what is a solution is just so constrained. People are some of our helpline partners before they had Delphina were using telephone hotlines that they had set up in the 1990s, which can work, but don't work today when most members are not going to answer the phone for unknown number. So, you know, it's not building an app for the sake of building an app. It's understanding why patients are not answering the phone in 2024 and how do you get them to engage proactively in ways that help us get ahead of the complications. And if you talk to the average employee at an average health plan or at the average health system, they're not going to know what's possible. So a lot of what we're doing is customer education saying, this is like your high risk pregnancy program. But instead of having 50 nurses making 500 phone calls a day, we have our software checking in on thousands of members automatically and reporting to you on the dashboard what needs to be done. So it's akin to, I would say, the EV revolution or maybe even a flying car revolution, right, where you know you need to get from point A to point B. You want to do it as safely, efficiently, and cheaply as possible. You just didn't know that there is such a car that can work without gasoline. And so that's what we've built here is showing them, look, we know you got to get from point A to point B, we have a new way of doing that, where instead of having humans do every little manual thing, we automate the things that can be done efficiently and with very high performance by a machine. And everything else, we leave for that human touch, freeing up the humans to do what we do best, which is empathically connecting with and supporting our patients. Now, I know it's somewhat early in the go-to-market journey, but to date, what do you think's been the most important go-to-market decision that you've made? I would say, bringing the OB/GYN physicians, nurse midwives, and doulas into the platform. That was a very unorthodox move when we did it. You know, we founded the company in '21, when it was the heyday of employer-focused direct consumer type digital health, where you just stand up some kind of telehealth selling for gods of money to, you know, the Googles and the large employers of the world and just say, "Great, they'll pay us for some new avenue that their employees have to access healthcare." And at the time, you know, there was actually a lot of investor pressure to say, "Yeah, okay, well, that's a quick go-to-market. We've seen a lot of companies scale pretty well there over the last three, four, five years, especially with COVID." But we said, "Look, we're looking to actually solve the $100 billion drop. We're not looking to put up a quick couple points on the board and just say, "Oh, we got revenue. We got a couple of marquee employer customers. We want to actually be able to serve all 3.6 million pregnancies in the United States and eventually $130 billion around the world." And so the way to do that is to build a deeply technical and clinical product that actually solves the clinical problem and results in healthier mobs and healthier babies. And then from that immense value that we're creating, saving on the order of tens of billions at scale, capturing some of that value as Delphina. And we realized the only way to do that, the only way to move the needle of clinic is by bringing the clinicians in on the platform. So we built out the software system. We built out this dashboard that integrates with the EHR and made that very accessible to providers in order to recruit them in stealthy to care. And that has now paid dividends. Because guess what? When the OB Gein says, "Miss Smith, I'd like you to download Delphina and use it so I can help support and track how your pregnancy is going." This Jones is going to do that 80 plus percent at the time. We just are out there in the ether trying to compete on CAC and doing all these Google ads and stuff. I don't think that's the way to build a sustainable company. And certainly not the kind of company that I wanted to build that actually solved the real clinical problem. So I think that was a correct decision. And at the time, it was kind of hazy and it's always been kind of controversial. Like, well, why don't we just do direct consumers? So it's doing it and it's going really well. Well, at the end of the day, we keep our eye on the wall, which is solving the real clinical problem yet. And the tens of billions of dollars value that that's doing. As you think ahead for the next, let's say 12 to 24 months, what's your number one top priority? Scaling to patients and providers around the country, we are currently in five states and will be in 50 states about 12 months from now. Our goal is for every single provider in the country to be able to use Delphina care effectively to take care of their patients. And every single pregnant mom in the country to be able to make effective use of the patient platform to experience that personalized pregnancy journey. We've already had a lot of clinical validation. We've already had case studies of lives that have been incredibly saved by use of Delphina care. And so now being able to take that success that we've done at the scale of thousands of patients and replicate it at the scale of millions of patients, that's really our goal in the next two years. Final question for you. Let's zoom out three to five years into the future. What's the big picture vision look like here? And what's going to be your impact if we zoom out five years? Five years from now, I'd like to have put a measurable dent in the eternal health crisis this country. And I'd like to be playing a larger role as company in the women's health equity gap more broadly, where women, not just in the United States, but around the world are actually receiving less value from the health care system. They do live longer, but they're getting less value from the health care system than men. And a big part of it is that when all the cardiovascular and metabolic health studies were done in the 1970s, they included often zero women. And now we just are dosing the same anti-hypertensives or all hypovisemics at the same level that we did for men, just titering it down. So I'd like to be playing a big role in women's health equity more broadly than just in pregnancy and postpartum care. And looking at pregnancy window as a very valuable and precious opportunity to deeply understand what someone's pregnancy journey will be like, but also what their metabolic cardiovascular and mental health may look like 15 or 20 or 30 years down the line. And having supported her through that pregnancy, being able to really deliver commensurate value in her 40s, 50s, and 60s. So that's my five-year vision for the company is we will have put a real mark on board in terms of reversing the maternal health crisis in this country. And we'll be tackling the broader women's health crisis to achieve health equity. Amazing. I love the vision. We are up on time, so we're going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there's any founders listening in that want to fall along with your journey, where should they go? Check us out on LinkedIn and check out our site Delphina.com. Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Brad. Really enjoyed our conversation. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Frontlines Media, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
