Inside Karthik Rajakumar's Journey Building Curee AI: The Vertically-Integrated AI Workforce Infrastructure for Healthcare

For the last decade, healthcare innovation has been defined by 'point solutions'—fragmented tools that digitized specific workflows but ultimately created data silos and portal fatigue. As the industry stares down a projected $2.2 trillion administrative spend within the next ten years, it has become clear that band-aid solutions won't suffice.

That’s why Karthik Rajakumar is building Curee AI, a vertically-integrated AI workforce infrastructure for healthcare that automates clinical and administrative workflows end-to-end, eliminating the silos that have plagued healthcare for decades.

Introducing Curee AI: The AI Workforce For Healthcare Outcomes

Curee AI is an AI workforce infrastructure for healthcare enterprises—a first-of-its-kind product modality where clinicians and non-clinicians run end-to-end workflows aided by agents to capture measurable outcomes, paired with a unified patient-facing app to deliver superior care. 

Healthcare administrative workflows, such as discharging a patient after surgery, are intricate. Innovative point solutions (applications that improve a single activity or task) have been introduced to solve parts of the puzzle, but these solutions have failed to create cohesive value and as a result have only created more complexity. As McKinsey described in 2025, although point solutions are addressing real challenges, their specificity is also “creating a new fragmentation problem.”

Curee takes a platform approach, deploying a vertically integrated stack where data flows across workflows to create compound value. Consider patient intake in a post-acute facility: instead of clinical and non-clinical teams collectively spending 10-20 hours processing a patient, a single expert working with Curee’s agent can streamline the entire process—from benefit verification and level of care calculations to estimating costs and per diem rates—in under a minute. 

Instead of sinking capital into legacy apps, health systems can deploy Curee directly on their cloud data lake to automate the work, effectively reallocating migration budgets to close the labor gap. Across the entire post-acute care workflow, this shift not only unlocks an 8-20% immediate revenue lift but ensures the system gets smarter with every patient encounter.

Karthik’s Journey to Curee AI

Karthik’s steps towards building Curee began far before he ever set out to launch a startup, though he didn’t know it at the time. After coming to the US for graduate school, he secured jobs at major firms such as Deloitte, PriceWaterhouseCooper’s, and Amazon.

Working specifically on healthcare-related services in each role, Karthik became familiar with the complex administrative challenges in the space and where preceding technologies had succeeded or failed to help. 

With ambitions for launching his own startup, Karthik began tinkering on solutions for healthcare, first working on a tool for medical coding. But once he completed the initial project and recruited the first member of his team, they realized they were only hitting the tip of the iceberg. Although they’d solved for medical coding, there were a long-tail of similar use cases that needed to be abstracted for medical workflows to become more efficient. And for multiple providers to get value, that would mean building multiple workflows.

Karthik knew that to help organizations actually improve revenue outcomes, he couldn’t just build another point solution—he'd need to build a complete platform that could enable healthcare providers to automate workflows from end-to-end. 

Having only launched Curee in the middle of last year, the team is already working with large care providers and physician service providers, helping them unlock a sizable revenue lift and increase patient capacity by 3x. 

By reallocating legacy cloud migration budgets to fund this digital workforce, health systems can reduce open labor requisitions by 50%, a transformation that unlocks value in days, not months.

Karthik’s advice for fellow founders

Sometimes making the leap to becoming a founder is as much a psychological challenge as it is a technical one. Karthik explains that prior to making the decision to build Curee, he was an “intellectual over-achiever” that investigated everything about being a founder. “I researched what to start, how to start, when to start for a very long time but did not actually start.” But the most important thing you can do, he emphasizes, is just get started and follow the path. 

In practice, Karthik and his team have adopted writing-first culture, a method he picked up during his time at Amazon. “We write about everything now,” Karthik explains. “When you write there’s no hiding. When building a deck, you can always hide behind things and hand wave. But when you put pen to paper there’s nothing you can hide behind. Start with writing and use writing to clear your thinking.”

To learn more about Karthik’s journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and visit curee.ai