Midi Health CEO Joanna Strober set out to launch a menopause startup, but ended up building an AI company.Tammy Horton/Nikki RitcherWomen's health startup Midi Health recently passed a $1 billion valuation.To scale faster, it built a custom chatbot that avoids outdated menopause data.Midi Health CEO Joanna Strober shared how AI has changed how she operates her business.Midi Health CEO Joanna Strober originally set out to launch a menopause startup. Then, AI changed everything.Founded in 2021, Midi Health provides virtual care to menopausal women and recently crossed the $1 billion valuation mark in a February funding round.At Business Insider's The Long Play event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Strober said AI has transformed her business."I thought I was starting a menopause company, but it turns out I'm building an AI company," Strober said onstage.Midi Health, based in Palo Alto, California, now uses AI to train thousands of its providers on how to answer patient questions.That's helped the company scale to serving more than 20,000 women a week — or millions a year.The move wasn't easy.

Because research on women's health — especially menopause — is sparse, general-purpose AI chatbots trained on the open internet weren't good enough.Midi Health had to build its own chatbot using only high-quality data and excluding studies that have since been disproven."There's a lot of old, outdated data," she said.AI dinners and office hoursBeyond the chatbot, Midi Health also uses AI in its internal systems.Strober has been flying around the country to have dinner with the company's nurses, talking through how they should use AI at work.She said she introduced one nurse — who was trying to standardize hundreds of contracts — to Google Gemini. The job, which the nurse thought would take about a month, ended up taking 10 minutes.Midi Health has also started holding AI office hours, where the company's software engineers help different teams "AI-ify" themselves.Strober says the shift isn't leading to mass layoffs."It's not threatening — it's really about augmenting their jobs," she said.Read the original article on Business Insider