Midi Health CEO Joanna Strober originally planned to launch a menopause startup. Then AI changed everything.
Founded in 2021, Midi Health provides virtual care to menopausal women and recently surpassed a $1 billion valuation in a February funding round.
At Business Insider’s “The Long Play” event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Strober said AI has changed her business.
“I thought I was starting a menopause company, but it turns out I’m actually building an AI company,” Strober said on stage.
Midi Health, based in Palo Alto, California, is currently training thousands of healthcare workers how to answer patient questions using AI.
The company has grown to serve more than 20,000 women a week, or millions of women a year.
This move was not easy. Because research on women’s health, especially menopause, is sparse, general-purpose AI chatbots trained on the open internet weren’t enough.
Midi Health had to build its own chatbot using only high-quality data and excluding studies that were subsequently disproved.
“There’s a lot of old and outdated data,” she says.
AI Dinner and Office Hours
In addition to chatbots, Midi Health also uses AI in its internal systems.
Strober travels across the country to have dinner with his company’s nurses and discuss how AI should be used in the workplace.
She said she introduced Google Gemini to a nurse who was trying to standardize hundreds of contracts. The task, which the nurses thought would take about a month, ended up taking just 10 minutes.
Midi Health has also started hosting AI Office Hours, where the company’s software engineers help various teams “AIize.”
Strober says the changes haven’t led to mass layoffs.
“It’s not a threat. It’s really about creating more work for them,” she says.