We are thrilled to announce Matchstick Ventures' investment in Automate Clinic, a company pioneering the infrastructure to make healthcare AI safe, reliable, and clinically trusted. As generative AI applications in healthcare accelerate, the demand for accurate, explainable, and validated models has never been greater. Yet most AI in healthcare today is trained on noisy, unverified data and lacks clinical oversight, posing risks to both patients and builders. Automate Clinic is solving this challenge by building a clinical-grade annotation and benchmarking platform powered by a nationwide network of expert physicians. As healthcare AI expands from research labs to real-world deployment, Automate Clinic is uniquely positioned to become the trusted clinical intelligence layer that sits between raw models and real patient care.

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Automate Clinic offers a comprehensive solution that connects AI developers with rigorously credentialed clinicians to produce expert-labeled training data, clinical accuracy corrections, and performance benchmarks. Unlike generic annotation platforms, Automate Clinic is purpose-built for healthcare’s high standards and regulatory needs. Its SaaS-based model includes multi-tiered annotation subscriptions and a Ground Truth Data API that enables recurring revenue and scalable upsell paths. The platform supports a range of use cases; AI scribes, diagnostics, risk scores, symptom checkers, and is backed by infrastructure that includes pre-labeling tools, QA systems, and clinician onboarding workflows. Customers stay because the platform not only improves their AI models but provides them with trusted benchmarks demanded by regulators, payers, and investors.

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The founding team brings deep experience in building and scaling physician-powered, tech-enabled healthcare startups. CEO Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH, previously founded Sherpaa, which exited in 2019, and is joined by co-founders with backgrounds at SteadyMD, Nabla, Crossover Health, and Sana. The team has worked together before and brings a rare combination of clinical credibility, product design, and operational leadership. Notably, their clinician network already includes 250+ physicians with specialties ranging from general practice to diagnostics, reinforcing the company’s defensibility and network effects.

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Why we’re excited about Automate

With the growth of LLMs, training data has become paramount to their usability and accuracy. This dynamic has propelled companies like Scale AI to multi-billion-dollar valuations (current estimates are around $7B, down from a reported peak of ~$29B following Meta’s investment). However, companies like Scale are optimized for volume and breadth—how quickly and cheaply they can train large datasets—which has contributed to many of the frustrations users experience with LLMs today. We believe the market increasingly demands deep specialization, and that companies with the strongest networks of domain experts will ultimately win.

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The team at Automate has built a deep network of doctors who are eager to see medical data become more accurate and reliable. CEO Jay Parkinson brings together his extensive experience in healthcare and a broad, trusted network of expert physicians to assemble a highly specialized team capable of training LLMs on complex and nuanced medical challenges.

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Additionally, unlike many other fields where incremental training delivers diminishing returns once an LLM is sufficiently mature, medicine is constantly evolving and requires continuous, high-quality retraining. We believe this dynamic positions a company like Automate to win over the long term, supported by a team of experienced founders well-suited to lead through this complexity.

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Finally, we believe healthcare represents one of the most important applications of highly accurate and reliable LLMs—improving outcomes for patients and providers alike while meaningfully reducing costs. While the business opportunity for Automate is significant, the potential impact on our collective health is equally compelling and deeply motivating.

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We are proud and excited to support this great company.

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