Tali AI - Toronto, Canada

Tali is a question answering chatbot from a library of evidence-based resources for patients with chronic conditions. They can ask questions in their natural language and get answers back from resources that are approved by the provider.

Tali AI - Mahshid Yassaei

Mahshid is the Co-founder and CEO of Tali. Prior to Tali, she co-founded Evenset, a specialized software development firm for the medical and healthcare industry. She has helped a wide range of companies from early stage to multi-billion dollar organizations and government agencies build their product and go to market. She has a Master’s degree in computer science from McGill University and has worked at BlackBerry and a few other companies before co-founding her first company.

What is the problem your company is trying to solve or the opportunity you are trying to seize? In other words, what is your secret sauce?

Patients with chronic conditions usually ask a lot of questions about their disease, the medication they are taking and what they can do in between visits to improve their condition. A lot of patients blindly fall back into googling their questions and consulting non evidence-based resources online. 

Most of these patients' visit time is also spent asking questions from their doctors, and rightfully so. But most of this education can happen during the idle time between visits.

We use advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to read and understand medical free-text and provide short answers to the questions from the thousands of evidence-based documents.

What is the biggest obstacle to growth?

Innovation in healthcare is inherently slow. The industry is not into the whole “move fast and break things” mantra. For that reason, the sales cycles in healthcare are slower and usually require long pilot studies to prove the efficacy of the technology. COVID-19 has helped push the whole industry to make faster decisions, however it has also overloaded the healthcare system with a lot more than they can handle. So pilot studies on technologies that are not directly helping with the pandemic are slowed down, which has caused us to do small pivoting in our value proposition as well.

How has COVID and the economic downturn changed your strategy, if at all?

COVID opened up a great opportunity for a technology like Tali. Patients and providers found themselves in the middle of a pandemic they didn’t know much about, there was new information everyday from the medical resources and government guidelines that could easily get lost in the abundance of misinformation that was readily available online.

Back in March, we quickly pivoted to running a pilot on COVID-19 content for patients and providers in Alberta. The feedback was hugely positive. Our users appreciated that we had offloaded the work of identifying evidence-based resources and making them available under a single interface and enabling it with a question answering algorithm.

In addition to that, COVID-19 pandemic pushed the healthcare system toward virtual care and telehealth platforms when in-patient visits were too dangerous. As a result these platforms saw a growth of almost 4000% month by month and reached their 5 year goals in a matter of months. As a result, we also shifted our business model toward selling to these technologies rather than directly to patients and providers.

What do you know now that you wish you knew two to five years ago about entrepreneurship?

I am usually very impatient for success in everything I do. This strong desire for outcome has been a driving force to gain results and move fast. However, through my experience as an entrepreneur I have had to relearn this lesson. I now know that being patient is equally important when you are walking the long road. Expecting results in a journey that is known to be tough, can be demoralizing and discouraging.