From PhD to 26 FDA Clearances: Building AI in Healthcare | Prashant Warrier

What do you do when you've built the technology first and the first customer who tries it tells you it's not working at all?

Prashant Warrier is the first PhD and the first scientist on Unstarted. A steel-town kid from Bhilai who went from IIT Delhi to a PhD in AI, he came back to India because of a stolen passport — and built Qure.ai, whose AI reads chest X-rays for TB and lung cancer across the world.

In this episode, Avnish and Prashant attempt to answer:

 1. How do you identify a unique problem is it about passion or market cap?

2. How do you know the technology is actually working?

 3. How can founders assess whether they're early, late, or correctly timed for a market?

 4. Will frontier AI kill vertical businesses or is there domain-specific stuff left to build?

 5. Why build a cutting-edge AI company from Mumbai?

This episode is in partnership with TEAM — Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai.

Chapters 

00:00 Introduction
1:41 Steel town to IIT to a PhD in AI
3:20 SAP, and the stolen passport that sent him home
6:32 Freedom over the US visa rat race
8:17 The 2012 breakthrough that started the company
11:43 A research lab with no business plan
13:33 "A solution looking for a problem"
16:52 The reality check & the real bottleneck
19:20 TB screening: 4 weeks to 30 seconds
21:43 Detecting lung cancer early with AI
24:23 Moats, ChatGPT & the future of AI in healthcare
32:04 Why Mumbai, and advice to founders