A total of $700,000 was raised by Bot M.D., an AI chatbot app developer for doctors, in seed funding from Y Combinator and angels, including Steve Blank, one of the inventors of the Lean Startup method.

"If you ever try searching stuff on Google, Google is a consumer-facing search engine, right?" founder and CEO Dorothea Koh commented. "So the stuff on top is always going to be WebMD, Mayo Clinic, [etc.]. These are not websites that doctors would necessarily go to for information. They want information from journals; they want information from peer review, reliable sources. And that’s exactly what Bot M.D. does for them."

Bot M.D. is intended to be an unconventional resource of data for doctors, chiefly the information they need in their daily practice like drug interactions, medical calculators, guidelines and protocols, and information on rare diseases. Doctors can even search for medical images and videos on the app. The app uses AI to display this information in a personified and even comical chatbot.

Apart from providing information, the app also has a dictation/transcribing feature.

"In particular in Venezuela, one of our doctors told us in his hospital, they’re kind of rural and remote," Koh said. "So they have eight medical residents who have to fight over one computer at the end of the day to type up all of their case notes. So the transcription thing, which is basically automatic voice detection transcription, is basically a lifesaver because all you have to do is record it and it transcribes it and you can email a copy to yourself."

It also presents a chat feature that allows doctors to securely chat with each another, and even call Bot M.D. (the AI) if they need added information on the topic being discussed.