Company leader
Eli Ben-Joseph
Co-founder and CEO
Regard
Eli Ben-Joseph is co-founder and chief executive of Regard, a clinical AI company whose software reads a hospital patient's entire chart and recommends diagnoses that doctors may have missed. He studied bioengineering at MIT and once planned to become a physician like his grandfather, before deciding to build technology for doctors instead.
A Pre-Med Path
Ben-Joseph grew up with a grandfather who was a dedicated physician and started on the pre-med path, he told AiThority in 2024. While shadowing in hospitals, he watched doctors who had loved their jobs burn out under paperwork and data overload. Those conversations led him away from practicing medicine and toward building software that would give doctors time back with patients.
From MIT to Stanford
He earned a bachelor's degree in bioengineering and biology at MIT and worked on special projects at the MIT Media Lab. After graduating he went into consulting and quickly decided it was not for him, then applied to medical school, he told Calibrate Ventures, an early investor. He chose a master's degree in computer science and management at Stanford University instead, and the startups around him there convinced him to start a company.
Starting HealthTensor
At Stanford he reached out to two long-time friends, including Nate Wilson, now Regard's chief operating officer, and they spent hours imagining what the doctor of the future might look like. The company, first called HealthTensor, was born in 2016. The team spent eight months interviewing hundreds of health care executives, doctors, and nurses, then most of two years building and testing a first product.
Its first major customer came from a cold email to a medical director at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in Torrance, California. Doctors there tested the product for more than a year before the hospital signed in 2021. Looking back, Ben-Joseph said the team's biggest mistake was not hiring and raising money faster, and his advice to new founders is short: “Trust your gut. If you believe it, you can build it.”
Building an AI Resident
“Doctors use our product because we help them make sure that nothing important is missed in the data,” Ben-Joseph told TechCrunch in 2024, describing a primary care physician who used Regard to catch atrial fibrillation that a cardiologist had not noticed. He expects large language models to keep improving until they “could essentially operate like an AI resident,” diagnosing, recommending treatments, and drafting notes for the doctors they work with. He has said Peter Lee's book The AI Revolution in Medicine shaped how he thinks about where clinical AI is going.