ABOUT Munjal
Munjal Shah
Munjal Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, a generative artificial intelligence startup focused on building foundation models for health care and using it to improve patient outcomes, lower health care costs, and address the growing shortage of health care workers worldwide.
Founded by generative AI researchers, hospital administrators, physicians, and Medicare experts, Hippocratic AI has developed a safety-focused large language model to provide nondiagnostic health care services. Its large language model outperformed Open AI’s GPT-4 on 105 of 114 health care exams and certifications. The company received a $65 million seed investment led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst and a number of health system partners.
Building on a background in AI research, Shah is a serial entrepreneur who has spent his career founding and operating companies that helped bring new ideas to the world.
His first company, Andale Inc., which he founded in 1999, was one of the first cloud-based software as a service companies for small businesses. The company, which provided cloud-based e-commerce management software to online merchants and auction sellers on eBay and Amazon Marketplace. Andale was acquired by Vendio in 2004 and later sold to Alibaba.
Following the sale of Andale, Shah created like.com, which was one of the first consumer facing companies to use AI-based computer vision and machine learning to search inside of digital photographs. Like.com let e-commerce shoppers search the colors, shapes, and patterns of clothing, shoes, handbags, and jewelry to find items that looked alike. The company created the first computer vision-driven search engine for shopping. Like.com was acquired by Google in 2010. It was the 10th largest acquisition Google had done at that time. The technology was integrated into Google Shopping.
The day after he sold the company to Google, Shah had a health crisis. This led him to focus his next venture on how to improve the health care of the country as a way to give back to the health system that had given him a second chance.
Shah launched Health IQ in 2013. The company initially focused on giving health-conscious consumers a discount on their life insurance via a unique machine learning algorithm that forecast their lower actuarial risk and convinced carriers to lower their rate. These policies were the first of their kind in giving vegans, vegetarians, marathon runners, cyclists, yoga enthusiasts, and more special rates on their insurance.
In 2019, Health IQ started using its AI algorithms to help seniors find the best Medicare Advantage plan. The algorithm, called Precision Medicare, was the first system that used the detailed health history of a senior to figure out which Medicare Advantage plan would give them the best outcomes and save them the most on their out-of-pocket costs. Over the course of four years, the company helped hundreds of thousands of seniors find the best plan for their specific health situation.
In 2023, he left the company to focus on Hippocratic AI after seeing that with generative AI, we finally had the technology breakthrough needed to use AI to truly improve health care outcomes.
In addition to founding his own companies, Shah was a seed investor in over 42 companies and 23 venture funds. A number of these companies ended up with successful exits or unicorn valuations including: Scopely (sold for $4.9B), PubMatic (IPO), RocketFuel (IPO), Kabam (sold for $1B-plus), Alation ($1B-plus valuation), Honor Health ($1B-plus valuation), Reify Health ($4B-plus valuation), Counsyl (sold to Myriad Genomics), Gyft (sold to First Data), Meebo (sold to Google), PatientPing (sold to Appriss), Blindsight (sold to Amazon), MessengerPeople (sold to Sinch), Refresh.io (sold to LinkedIn), TaskRabbit (sold to Ikea), Lift Labs (sold to Google), and more.
Shah received his Bachelor of Science in computer science from the University of California San Diego, where his senior thesis focused on the use of neural networks to predict protein ligand binding efficacy and earned a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford, where he focused on artificial intelligence.