Telepatia raises $33M from Andreessen Horowitz to deploy AI healthcare across Latin America

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

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. 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.

Investing in Telepatia | Andreessen Horowitz

Nicolás Abad's father was the kind of doctor patients never forget. A physician in Colombia, he became known as "Telepatia" because of his uncanny ability to understand what was wrong before patients had even finished explaining their symptoms. He died at 58 from a preventable drug interaction - just days before the release of ChatGPT, which helped usher in a new generation of AI capable of catching this type of risk. Today, Nico is building the product that could have helped save his father's life, and that his father would have loved as a doctor. We're excited to announce our lead investment in Telepatia's $33 million Series A. Latin America has 700 million people, but a severe shortage of clinicians. The region has 43% fewer physicians and 65% fewer nurses per capita than OECD countries on average. Where the United States has spent decades piling software on top of a fractured system and created a new kind of mess, Latin America has the advantage of starting from a clean slate, and the potential to leapfrog the clinician shortage entirely. Telepatia is building the AI-native clinical platform for Latin America. Its platform combines AI documentation, clinical decision support, and a growing suite of AI healthcare employees -- including AI doctors, nurses, and auditors -- integrated across hospital systems and trained on clinical guidelines, peer-reviewed literature, and local institutional protocols. Since launching in July 2025, the platform has deployed across 25+ hospital systems in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, reaching 14 million patients. Doctors use it all day. Protocol adherence has risen from 84% to 99% after deployment with physicians recovering 1.7 hours daily - time they now spend with patients. Telepatia has already prevented 60,000 medical errors in real time, allowing physicians to adjust course immediately. Take it from the customers themselves. "The real test of any clinical tool is whether doctors actually use it," says José Henrique Dias Salvador, CEO of Mater Dei in Brazil. "Our physicians use Telepatia eight hours a day. We've never seen adoption like that." The top 100 health institutions in Latin America employ 50% of physicians. This concentration means that a single platform can achieve outsized distribution once it breaks into the top systems. Win the right logos, and distribution compounds in ways that simply aren't possible in more saturated markets. Telepatia is achieving this. We are joined in this round by Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Rappi founder Simón Borrero, and Nubank founder David Vélez, three leaders who have built and scaled transformative technology in complex industries across Latin America and the world. Nico's father had a wall covered with portraits of Nobel laureates he admired - scientists like Allvar Gullstrand and Richard Feynman whose discoveries changed the course of medicine and science. We asked Nico what winning a Nobel Prize would feel like. He said: earning a place on that wall. Nico's goal is to win the first Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to a Latin American since 1984. As he puts it, "Recent Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry have gone to breakthroughs powered by AI. We believe Medicine is next."