Ada Health built an AI-driven startup by moving slowly and not breaking things – TechCrunch

When Ada Health was founded nine years ago, hardly anyone was talking about combining artificial intelligence and physician care -- outside of a handful of futurists. But the chatbot boom gave way to a powerful combination of AI-augmented health care which others, like Babylon Health in 2013 and KRY in 2015, also capitalized on. The journey Ada was about to take was not an obvious one, so I spoke to Dr. Claire Novorol, Ada's co-founder and chief medical officer, at the Slush conference last year to unpack their process and strategy. Co-founded with Daniel Nathrath and Dr. Martin Hirsch, the startup initially set out to be an assistant to doctors rather than something that would have a consumer interface. At the beginning, Novorol said they did not talk about what they were building as an AI so much as it was pure machine learning. Years later, Ada is a free app, and just like the average chatbot, it asks a series of questions and employs an algorithm to make an initial health assessment.