A Colombian AI startup wants to assist half of Latin America’s doctors. Andreessen Horowitz just backed it.

TL;DR

Telepatia raised $33M from a16z to reach half of Latin America’s 1.9M doctors by 2027. It already serves 14M patients across five countries.

Telepatia, an AI clinical assistant built for Latin American healthcare, has raised $33 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company wants to reach half of the region’s 1.9 million doctors by the end of 2027. Total funding is now $42 million, with early backers including Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Rappi founder Simon Borrero, and Nubank founder David Velez.

The product transcribes consultations in real time, reviews medical records, flags potential errors, and makes live suggestions based on medical literature and clinical guidelines. CEO Nicolas Abad calls it “a second brain for the doctor.” At Hospital Mater Dei in Brazil, physicians use the tool an average of eight hours a day and recover 1.7 hours daily, according to company data.

The origin story is personal. Abad’s father, a physician, died in late 2022 at age 58 after a preventable drug interaction. He had spent years reading medical papers about his own illness, but an interaction between a hiccup treatment and a sleep medication proved fatal. “This is the product that would have saved my father as a patient, and that he would have loved as a doctor,” Abad said.

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Latin America is a natural market. Brazil and Colombia each have roughly 2.4 to 2.5 doctors per 1,000 people, a third fewer than the OECD average. Colombia has just 1.5 nurses per 1,000, compared to the OECD’s 9.5. Doctors and nurses spend 40% to 70% of their time on documentation and administrative tasks rather than direct patient care. Telepatia is betting AI can stretch that workforce by handling the paperwork.

In less than a year, the startup says it has reached more than 14 million patients through 25+ public and private health institutions in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. Clients include publicly traded Brazilian hospital groups Mater Dei, Kora Saude, and Hapvida, as well as public health networks in Bogota, Medellin, and Barranquilla.

“We just clearly saw them as the winner,” said Daisy Wolf, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We believe healthcare is going to be the industry most transformed by AI.” For a16z, which has backed US ambient documentation startups Abridge AI and Ambience Healthcare, Telepatia is one of its largest AI healthcare investments outside the US.

Regulation is still forming. Brazil’s Senate has approved an AI bill creating a risk-based framework, pending lower house and presidential approval. Colombia has sent its own AI bill to Congress. Telepatia positions itself carefully: it supports clinicians rather than making decisions, with the doctor always making the final call. The company plans to deepen Latin American operations before expanding to India, Africa, and Southeast Asia, where the same physician shortage and documentation burden exist at even larger scale.