Doctronic is Matt Pavelle’s twelfth startup. He’s launched and led companies for renters’ rewards, wine shopping, and luxury fashion. About two-thirds of them have been direct-to-consumer, while the rest have contracted with businesses to reach consumers.
Doctronic brings Pavelle’s longtime consumer focus to a new domain: healthcare AI. And Doctronic has raised $5 million in seed funding, led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Tusk Ventures and startup accelerator HF0.
Google, and now AI models like ChatGPT, receive hundreds of millions, if not billions, of health-related questions from their users every day. Doctronic wants to use AI to improve that system by connecting patients with AI agents that can provide them with fast, anonymous, and personalized healthcare advice and connect them with a doctor when necessary.
Pavelle built Doctronic after seeing numerous friends and family members struggle to get timely and actionable responses from their healthcare providers about their own symptoms.
“If people who have some of the best health insurance possible in the country are having this much difficulty getting answers from their doctors, what happens to everybody else?” he said.
He and cofounder Adam Oskowitz launched New York-based Doctronic in September 2023 as a free service. Doctronic users share their age and sex, input their symptoms, and get four likely explanations and a plan of action, including a standardized note to share with their provider.
As of December, if those users want immediate care, they can book a video visit with a licensed medical professional through Doctronic. Patients can request a visit 24/7 in all 50 states and be connected with a provider, usually within 30 minutes, starting at $39.
Behind the scenes, the system is more than just an AI chatbot. It’s a multi-agent framework: different AI “specialists” handle different areas of medicine, debate their findings, and pass their work to a human clinician for validation. The platform is LLM-agnostic — depending on the question, it might route to OpenAI, Anthropic, or multiple models at once and take the consensus.
“We’re trying to build a seamless way for someone to come in and ask questions, or look for help navigating the medical system, and for us to figure out what they need and pass them to the right experts,” Pavelle said.
Doctronic is competing with other healthcare startups like Roon, a Sequoia-backed company that raised $15 million in November to create a database of videos on health conditions, and tech giants like OpenAI, which has spawned numerous intelligence models used by doctors and patients alike, whether or not they’re designed specifically for medical information.
Pavelle said Doctronic may eventually consider partnerships with gig economy marketplaces or employers to bring more users to its platform, but for now, Doctronic is staying firmly consumer-first. That’s where most of the demand is coming from anyway — Pavelle said Doctronic gets most of its users from organic search, including from patients looking up their health questions on Google and finding Doctronic’s site that way. The startup has also created some specialized landing pages, including for women’s health and COVID-19.
“We see around 50,000 people a week — we’ve built something people really like, with lots of repeat users,” Pavelle said. “We just want to keep improving to streamline the health system.”