Whilst the startup world is often defined by ‘product-market fit’, on the Techstars entrepreneur programme we undertook in 2022, we were introduced to the similar concept of ‘product-founder fit.’ We certainly had found a problem that we were the right people to fix. Harvinder was an NHS doctor, who witnessed firsthand how admin consumed clinicians’ time, often out of working hours. Such was the overload, colleagues began to input sensitive patient data into ChatGPT. This was a deeply unsustainable, unworkable solution to a considerable problem. Salinna's background is at the forefront of AI research and its application in healthcare, having studied for a PhD at UCL and worked at Intel. It meant Motics would be prepared to both understand and apply technology to the point of care, whilst securely handling patient data. Together, we realised we could build practical, genuinely useful solutions to real clinical problems.
Startups are in a unique position in the AI era, where agility empowers adoption at a much faster rate.
We knew we had to build AI to the point where it could genuinely handle clinical admin at the quality and safety level healthcare demands: across a variety of applications from medical transcription, to automated AI phone call reception, to billing and clinic-wide audit trails. We founded Motics around a simple principle: patients, not paperwork. Now, with backing from investors such as Morgan Stanley, we deliver regulated AI as clinical infrastructure, serving hundreds of UK clinics daily.
Start-ups are in a unique position in the AI era, where agility empowers adoption at a much faster rate. Motics delivers AI to clinics, and also uses the latest AI across its own internal workflows, from product development to content output and the hiring process. This creates a compounding advantage: our entire team, from sales and marketing to the engineers, deeply understands the tools they're building because they live inside them every day. Being small means being able to adopt the latest developments in days, not quarters, which is critical when the underlying technology is moving this fast and competition to deliver robust AI solutions to healthcare is so intense.
Motics streamlines their operations, saving clinicians two hours per day.
But there is an irony: healthcare is not a space where you can ‘move fast and break things’. Trust is the currency that is king, from product to patient. Results are critical at the point of care, so speed has to coexist with rigour and regulation. Building a team culture that can deliver quickly and safely is the real challenge, not just the technology itself. Hiring carefully matters more than hiring fast; in a small team, every person shapes the culture and the product. For a long time, it was just the two of us. Many of our customers are still shocked when they find out how small our team is: just five of us at the moment. But being small means we have warm relationships with them, even the larger enterprises, across the entire team – and provides the basis to build the trust that matters so much.
That closeness is also important in helping us to understand our customers' workflows and pain points, not just the ones they tell us about. And with AI, our customers are finding solutions to problems they didn't even know were problems, inefficiencies so embedded in daily practice they'd become invisible. You can't discover those problems from a distance. But when you have a good rapport with your customers and understand the quirks within their workflows, it is far easier to build genuinely useful products. And when we're constantly looking to improve the way that we do things internally, which we're mandated to do by virtue of the size of our team, the process becomes all the more logical.
The highlights make it all worthwhile. Some of our largest enterprise customers are expanding rapidly, with Motics streamlining their operations and saving clinicians two hours per day. We hear directly from clinicians that they can spend more time with patients rather than doing admin.
We're scaling across the UK and into new markets such as Canada and the EU, which means we’ll need more salespeople and engineers – but which also brings the challenge of new regulations, workflows and clinical expectations to navigate. We believe the companies who win in healthcare AI won't just be the ones with the best products, but the ones with the best teams to distribute them to the frontlines of care.
Motics, founded by Dr Harvinder Power and Dr Salinna Abdullah, builds regulated AI for private healthcare. Its five AI agents serve hundreds of UK clinics daily.
www.motics.ai
