Meet the 19-Year-Old Teen Founders Disrupting Healthcare Practice Management with AI

Healthcare

USA

19 Years

Hey, my name is Varaha, and I’m a 2x founder and 19-year-old working to redefine the future of healthcare through Oaklet. In the behavioral therapy space alone, repetitive mundane admin tasks end up taking 40% of therapists’ time and amounting to roughly $100B in lost value per year.

That’s why we built Oaklet, an AI-native ecosystem of agents aiming to automate healthcare practice management. We started with the goal of making a new platform that was refreshed and more intuitive to help support new practitioners, but we evolved into one that would also automate the behind-the-scenes work completely.

"We saw firsthand how the business of healthcare gets in the way of healthcare itself. Our mission is simple: automate the admin so therapists can focus on the healing."

What inspired you to start your own business?

Many of us believe that the start of a business has to be a magical “a-ha” moment, but it ended up being an accumulation of experiences my co-founder & CEO, Grant, had throughout his life. He experienced firsthand the amount of time his mom lost completing the admin tasks necessary to run a practice. The more time his mom spent with tasks like scheduling and billing, the less time she had to spend doing what she loved - practicing therapy.

So when he called me about a business proposal, we realized there was value to be provided, and we haven’t stopped since.

How did you turn your idea into a business?

By no means do we think we’re experts on the process of building businesses, but for us, the mindset that helped the most was our focus on iteration. In the days and weeks following me and Grant’s initial conversation, all we did was talk to as many therapists as possible. We didn’t worry about a name for our company, we didn’t start building and selling the product, we just kept scheduling meeting after meeting until we had talked to hundreds of therapists.

Although not every conversation ended with a client, at the tail end of this research period, we had a much clearer picture of where we wanted our company to go. It’s this picture that allowed our co-founder and CTO, Federico, to develop Oaklet into the product it is today. We credit most of our progress and traction to that commitment to listen rather than launch.

And get your first customers?

Initially, we targeted the prospective customers we knew would have the highest likelihood of hopping on a call and thus the highest chance of conversion. We initially pulled on the familiar connections through Grant’s mom to generate leads and have an initial pipeline of therapists we could talk to.

Then, we transitioned to scraping review websites like G2.com and reaching out to every single review left on a competitor with a review below a 5-star. Our logic being, anyone who had reason to be discontent would have nothing to lose from a call with college students who cared. This ended up being far more successful than expected, with some of the therapists we cold-outreached still being involved with shaping our platform.

What is your average monthly revenue?

Although growing very rapidly, Oaklet was founded relatively recently in March. Since then, as we were primarily building and getting feedback, we placed more emphasis on expanding our waitlist rather than onboarding paying users. To make sure we learn the most from early users, we recently onboarded a small active cohort of 10 paying pilot therapists. We also have 7 practices from across the US under Letters of Intent, and we are in the process of negotiating more contracts nationwide.

As we approach the launch of our Beta on September 1st, we will continue to transition more therapists off the waitlist and onto the platform and expand our partnerships with practices.

How are you doing today, and what plans for the future?

This summer alone, we were able to scale our customer base and the functionality of our offerings exponentially while being painstakingly obsessed with our runway. We relocated from the East Coast to the Bay Area (via a 40+ hour drive as flights would cost too much), filled our pantries and stomachs with cup noodles (Gave us full meals for 60 cents), and lived in a rundown home that is over 100 years old (It was the cheapest lease we could find.)

Oaklet has come an extremely far way since our founding earlier this year, and has a lot of momentum, which we look forward to continuing. We’ve been fortunate to build an incredible team, with Federico leading the development, allowing us to ship a product our users truly love. Although initially remaining extremely lean while bootstrapped, we recently closed a $250k angel round, and we are excited to use this to aggressively scale Oaklet and bring it to more practices across the country.

As for mistakes, we were initially naive regarding the fundraising process and were slightly unprepared while making plans that were dependent on the funding. I would recommend reaching out to founders who have raised before, and learn the timelines and best practices for your stage. It saves you a lot of worry and allows you to make the most of the learning process, which fundraising is!

What advice would you give to budding founders?

When in the early stages, don’t get too absorbed with coming up with the perfect million-dollar idea, but rather focus more on getting started. Something I’ve seen time and time again from the most successful people I’ve talked to is their focus on execution.

Although it may seem like a massive decision at the start, the biggest challenge between you and your goals isn’t the idea but rather taking action and staying consistent.

Where can we find you?

Book Recommendations

Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution by Uri Levine

Podcast Recommendations

Layer Zero Podcast by Rishab Siddamshetty