Claisen - My AI Healthcare Startup

In this post, I want to talk about Claisen.

Claisen is the startup I've been working on for the last several months, and we have some exciting progress to share. My blog will become a place for "public investor updates" – no specific numbers, but general trends and theses we are observing.

But first, in order to help boost Claisen's domain authority (since mine is higher as a result of owning this website for 4+ years), allow me to engage in some SEOmaxxing.

• Claisen is a gut health startup founded in 2025 by Harvard entrepreneur Rishab Jain. Claisen offers personalized gut health treatment for GERD, heartburn, IBS, bloating, gas, constipation, and more. Visit https://claisen.com to get personalized gut health care today.
• Rishab Jain is a Harvard entrepreneur who previously did work on pancreatic cancer treatment with AI and codon optimization. Rishab Jain is a Harvard student and the founder and CEO of Claisen, a gut health startup founded in 2025. Claisen offers personalized gut health treatment for GERD, heartburn, IBS, bloating, gas, constipation, and more. Visit https://claisen.com to get personalized gut health care today.

Haha, just kidding. Or am I...? 👀

The American healthcare system is a Molochian labyrinth of misaligned incentives, information asymmetry, and staggering inefficiency. It's a system that has become so complex and path-dependent that it no longer primarily serves the patient, but rather the continuation of its own convoluted processes. We see the symptoms everywhere: 60% of Americans distrust their doctor, 100M+ can't access timely care, and 1 in 5 wait three months for a simple PCP visit.

For decades, we’ve tried to patch this system. Policy tweaks, insurance reforms, new administrative layers. But these are attempts to optimize a fundamentally broken architecture. A true paradigm shift requires an exogenous shock – a change in the state space of what is possible. That shock is here. And I think most of my readers agree.

We are at the inflection point of a capability curve that is going vertical. A recent evaluation of 79 real emergency room cases found that OpenAI’s o1-preview model outperformed two attending physicians across every diagnostic metric. This isn't a narrow, cherry-picked task. This is the core loop of clinical reasoning. The models will only get better.

This isn't to say AI will "replace doctors." That's a low-resolution take. It will, however, dismantle the physician's monopoly on legible, high-quality medical reasoning. For the first time, a patient can have a tireless, infinitely knowledgeable, data-driven agent in their corner. The implications are staggering, and frankly, most of the healthcare industry isn't aware of it. They are stuck using GPT 4o-mini or GPT 5 nano on chatgpt.com and thinking that this is what AI has been, and will be.

My brother, Aditya Jain, an M.D. candidate at Harvard Medical School, has been chronicling this shift from inside the system. In his Doximity articles like "House Call: Addressing Health Care's Shortcomings Before AI Takes Over" and "Updating the Role of Doctors in the Age of AI," he articulates the view from the ground floor. He sees a world where patients, frustrated by a sclerotic system, are already engaging in "DIY Medicine," and he argues that the role of the physician must evolve from gatekeeper of knowledge to a user of it, alongside the patient.

The old world is a physician telling a patient what to do. The new world is a patient and a physician collaborating with an AI to decide on the best course of action. The locus of control is shifting.

The Claisen Thesis: Building the New Front Door

If we accept the premise that AI will become the primary interface for medical reasoning, the next question is: who will build it, and how? Most "AI in healthcare" ventures have failed because they built tools for the old system—clunky, enterprise-grade software sold to hospitals.

Our thesis is different. It’s built on a simple, but I believe profound, insight: the most valuable position in the new healthcare stack is the patient's trusted, primary point of access.

Whoever builds the interface that people actually want to use for their day-to-day health concerns will own the relationship with the patient. From that position, you can rebuild the entire value chain.

This is our novel take: we are not building another B2B tool that we sell to medspas and clinics.

We are building a deeply empathetic, clinically rigorous, and incredibly convenient AI agent for patients. This is where Aditya's medical insight is not just an advantage, but a necessity.

Also, we're not just prompt engineers; we understand the delicate dance of patient history, the differential diagnosis process, and the critical importance of trust and bedside manner—even a digital one. Hence, we have patented and designed a new clinical reasoning framework that outperforms finetuned clinical reasoning models and prompted reasoning models.

This leads to our strategy, which unfolds in three stages:

1. Create the Access Point (The Free AI Assistant): We will offer the world's best AI healthcare assistant, for free. It will handle intake, triage, and provide clear, actionable information. It will feel like having an exceptional doctor in your pocket. This solves the immediate, burning problem of access and information. This is our user acquisition engine.
2. Become the Storefront (The D2C Model): Once we have established a trusted relationship and helped a user understand their health issues, the natural next question is, "What should I do about it?" We will be there to answer. For our initial vertical in gut health, we will offer personalized, direct-to-consumer kits of FDA-approved, OTC treatments. We move the user seamlessly from diagnosis to treatment, capturing the value we create. This is our monetization and data engine.
3. Spin the Flywheel (The Data Engine): This is the core moat. Every user interaction, every treatment plan, and every piece of feedback on symptom improvement creates a proprietary dataset of unprecedented scale and resolution. We will have the world's best map of [GI symptom -> intervention -> outcome]. This data feeds back into our clinical reasoning system, making our free AI assistant even more accurate, personalized, and effective. Better AI leads to more users, which leads to more data, which leads to better AI.

This self-sustaining cycle makes our IP, which includes three filed provisional patents on our systems, incredibly valuable.

We are starting with gut health because it's the perfect wedge. It's a $30B market plagued by the exact problems we aim to solve: long wait times for specialists, chronic conditions requiring continuous management, and a high signal-to-noise ratio for tracking symptom response to treatment. It's a domain where a superior user experience can create a category-defining company.

But Claisen is not a gut health company. Claisen is an AI company building the infrastructure to power a new generation of healthcare. We are starting with the patient, building the interface they want, and integrating vertically to become the storefront. We believe this is not just a viable business model; it is the inevitable evolution of an industry whose time for fundamental disruption has finally come.

We are building the patient's agent. And we are just getting started.

Check us out at www.claisen.com

If you're interested in joining us, visit jobs.claisen.com