While trying to pick a name for his startup venture, Sayem Hoque kept returning to an “old school” and “gritty” college football phrase.
Now, his startup has nothing to do with athletics. But the flexbone formation seemed to be a strong analogy for what he was looking to build at the intersection of AI and healthcare.
“Choosing a name took forever. I had dozens of names [for the company] written down, but everything sounded too generic and soulless. I used some sites to gauge the SEO friendliness of my name ideas and kept coming back to Flexbone. It’s an offensive formation in football, and Georgia Tech ran it during my years there under Coach Paul Johnson. It’s an old school, gritty offense that demands discipline and good execution, even if some people find it boring or not flashy,” Hoque told Hypepotamus. “As Flexbone is based in Atlanta, I wanted it to have a college football themed name and wanted it to be reliable and do things for customers that could be considered boring but is super valuable to them long term.”
That long-term value is what the startup Flexbone captures as it serves early customers including ambulatory services, surgery centers, and healthcare facilities. These clients use Flexbone to ensure every patient interaction is “captured, summarized, and shared.”
AI Opportunities In Healthcare
At its core, Flexbone builds datasets and AI agents (autonomous software systems) to address critical workflow gaps and redundancies found across healthcare today. The platform automates the manual work that happens across voice, web, and EHR (electronic health records).
“At a typical surgery center, multiple staff members might touch a single prior authorization; someone calls the payor, someone else follows up, a third person updates the chart. AI can help keep things coordinated and keep this process from becoming stale and breaking down. Leaks occur because no one knows what the last person was told or is collecting this data at scale for the organization to learn best practices,” Hoque added.
Hoque said that Flexbone transcribes and summarizes an initial conversation between a staff member and a payor, then provides sources for next steps. The HIPAA-compliant platform stores data that has traditionally been “disparate or just uncaptured.”
“We’ve seen this reduce redundant calls and follow-ups by 40% for a customer. Staff save time, and work that was backed up moves faster after Flexbone was implemented,” Hoque added.
Building Flexbone in Atlanta
After building his career at both corporate and GovTech and HealthTech startups, Hoque returned to Atlanta during the COVID pandemic to launch Flexbone. The Gwinnett County native and Georgia Tech graduate had spent two years as a software engineer at Palantir and worked at startups including Hawkfish, Turquoise Health, and Y Combinator-backed Just Appraised before launching his own venture.
Hoque feels that the healthcare world is in the “first inning” when it comes to agentic work, where systems act autonomously. He said the recent traction in the space gets him excited about what is to come.
“I’ve dealt with leadership who want to grow their businesses, reply to customers faster, stop revenue leaks they know have cost them hundreds of thousands. We’ve been asked to translate a labyrinthine of insurance documents and the exciting parts have been when you deal with a prospect who knew our platform could potentially help them before I even gave a full demo,” he added.
Early use cases have been built largely from “inbound and customer asks,” Hoque told Hypepotamus.
The team, currently made of three people, is building in Midtown Atlanta and The Biltmore building, which is growing as a startup hub for the city.
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Featured photo Sayem Hoque (from LinkedIn)
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