Hemo.ai — a startup that identifies potential diseases or bodily deficiencies

Alua Musralina, city — Almaty, AI Engineer, Founder and CEO, @hemoai

How It All Began

By my first degree, I am an electrical engineer, and in the past, I conducted scientific research in the field of autonomous vehicles in Germany. In 2023, I graduated from the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence.

The idea for creating a product to assist in disease diagnosis stemmed from personal experience: for eight years, I suffered from lactose intolerance, which I was only able to cure two years ago. A Kazakhstani integrative medicine doctor helped me with this. Although I had lived in Germany for many years, doctors practicing evidence-based medicine there reached a dead end, simply shrugging their shoulders. Usually, if specialists cannot find the cause, they blame genetics, stress, psychosomatics, and so on.

I do not deny evidence-based medicine, but we also utilize numerous other studies for diagnosing diseases and assisting patients. Every organism is unique and requires a comprehensive approach for diagnosis and treatment. We strive to provide such an approach.

The Team

Participating in my first hackathon ever — as part of Leap 2024 in Riyadh — was a spontaneous decision. It offered the opportunity to secure further funding for the developed product. Within 72 hours, I developed the first version of the AI architecture, which served as the foundation for our product. It was there that I met our CTO from Dagestan.

My co-founder is my sister. She is a doctor in Finland and previously worked for many years as a medical advisor at companies such as Lilly and Johnson & Johnson. She was one of the first to support the idea. Our team also includes a marketer and PR specialist — we are working to raise awareness about the product's capabilities and encourage its use, appearing on television, in podcasts, and in the media. Recently, an experienced developer and AI scientist, a long-time acquaintance of mine, joined our team. I immediately thought of him when I realized we needed to enhance our technological advantage as soon as possible.

Target Audience

We are developing a product for people. I want there to be as few errors as possible in disease diagnosis, and for disorders to be detected as early as possible, before they lead to serious problems.

If you have complaints about rapid fatigue, dry skin, hair loss, frequent infections, and other similar symptoms, your body may be signaling disruptions, and you need to undergo testing. You may have one of the three most common diseases, which statistically affect one in every two people. Therefore, we recommend taking our questionnaire for free and undergoing the tests suggested by the questionnaire results. After completing it, you can upload your test results to our system and receive diagnostic outcomes, as well as recommendations for diet and vitamins. Currently, we are expanding functionality, working on liver and intestinal diseases.

Several clinics have already expressed interest in testing our system with doctors. I want to create an application accessible to everyone, where anyone can get a second opinion. Our goal is to make it a reliable source of information and health assessment that people can trust.

Incubation Programs

In 2023, I completed Hero Training at Draper University, and in February of this year, I participated in ABC Weekend in Almaty organized by NURIS, where we took second place and advanced directly to the second stage of the ABC Incubation program. On June 4, we successfully completed this program, winning the Potential Unicorn award. We also received funding in the amount of 1.5 million tenge, conditional on completing their acceleration program.

Additionally, on July 4, we completed the IRA06 acceleration program from MOST BI.

Challenges

We are just at the beginning of the journey. There have been, are, and will be difficulties. But we understand where we are going and why we are doing all this. The more complex the task, the more interesting it is to solve. That is how we grow.

Achievements

In 2023, I graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology with excellent grades and participated in the nFactorial incubator, where I took second place. From that moment on, I discovered a new world of startups. I have a more scientific approach to problem-solving, and the work at this stage reminds me of working on my doctoral dissertation.

Plans

By the end of 2024, we aim to conduct testing in clinics and optimize the solution. We plan to gather as many cases as possible where our product helped doctors and users of our web application.

Following successful tests in clinics in Kazakhstan, we plan to scale into Middle Eastern countries and the United States.