SAYKARA Investment Thesis

Saykara is a Seattle-based startup which was founded in 2015 to provide a virtual scribe for physicians. Doctors’ visits produce a lot of patient data which must be captured and updated in an EMR platform. Currently, physicians use one of three approaches to capture this data: they enter notes into an EMR while they see the patient (pain point: distracting), they dictate notes after the visit and have an offshore assistant enter the notes into an EMR (pain point: costly, laborious), or they hire a scribe to sit in the exam room with them and handle the documentation (pain point: expensive and long ramp up time). Saykara offers a fourth alternative – a virtual assistant that uses natural language processing to capture the most important elements of the doctor-client interaction and then automatically populates the EMR. The EMR entries which are created by the platform undergo a manual review by a human scribe for accuracy.

Saykara’s solution is compelling – it promises doctors both an improved quality of life and increased earning potential. Virtual scribes (~$12k per annum) are also much less expensive than the current alternatives: an in-person human scribe (~$42k per annum) or an offshore tech-enabled scribe (~$30k per annum).

The analogue with one of Elevate’s existing portfolio companies is Ocrolus. The fundamental technology serves a simple pain point of voice transcription into EMR with highly targeted Machine Learning. It benefits from having a “human in the loop” that reviews and smooths this data, making it more accurate and viable, while not wasting hours performing verbatim transcription.

Saykara benefits from having an excellent founding team that all have deep engineering and domain expertise (coming over from Amazon/Alex and Nuance). The founding CEO, Harjinder Sandhu, is a technical founder that was also a Computer Science professor. Prior to founding Saykara, Harjinder was at Nuance, which was a leader in the voice-to-text space (best known for the software Dragon Naturally Speaking). The combination of founding team and market opportunity and initial customer feedback make Saykara a compelling company.