While a medical student at UC San Francisco, Dereck Paul grew concerned that innovation in medical software was lagging behind other sectors, like finance and aerospace. He came to believe that patients are best served when doctors are equipped with software that reflects the cutting edge of tech, and dreamed of starting a company that’d prioritize the needs of patients and doctors over hospital administrators or insurance companies.So Paul teamed up with Graham Ramsey, his friend and an engineer at Modern Fertility, the women’s’ health tech company, to launch Glass Health in 2021. Glass Health provides a notebook physicians can use to store, organize and share their approaches for diagnosing and treating conditions throughout their careers; Ramsey describes it as a “personal knowledgement management system” for learning and practicing medicine.“During the pandemic, Ramsey and I witnessed the overwhelming burdens on our healthcare system and the worsening crisis of healthcare provider burnout,” Paul said. “I experienced provider burnout firsthand as a medical student on hospital rotations and later as an internal medicine resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Our empathy for frontline providers catalyzed us to create a company committed to fully leveraging technology to improve the practice of medicine.”Glass Health gained early traction on social media, particularly X (formerly Twitter), among physicians, nurses and physicians-in-training, and this translated to the company’s first funding tranche, a $1.5M pre-seed round led by Breyer Capital in 2022. Glass Health was then accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch

Comics software, meat-based plants and Tesla spun-out heat pumps, anyone?