Company leader
James Hare
Co-founder and CEO
Us2.ai
James Hare is the co-founder and chief executive of Us2.ai, a Singapore company whose AI software analyzes heart ultrasound scans and drafts the echo report. He co-founded the travel company eDreams, and Us2.ai is his third startup, which he built with his wife, the cardiologist Carolyn Lam.
Early Career in Technology
Hare earned a BA at Harvard and later an MBA at Stanford. He held business development and marketing roles across the US, Europe, and Asia at EFI, Ubisoft, Netscape, and the World Economic Forum.
Co-founding eDreams
He co-founded eDreams, the online travel company, and served as its president. The company went public in 2014 and grew into one of Europe's largest e-commerce sites, operating in 44 countries with more than €4.5 billion in yearly bookings.
Two Different Echo Reports
Hare had stepped away from work when a routine heart checkup gave him two opposite readings, one good and one bad. He recalled the moment this way: "My light bulb moment was when, at a top rate hospital, I received two very different cardiac echo reports from two different highly trained specialists."
His heart turned out to be healthy, but the gap drew him out of retirement to start a third company. He founded it in Singapore in 2017 as eko.ai with Lam and the cardiovascular researcher Yoran Hummel.
Building Us2.ai
The company took the name Us2.ai in 2021, when its first fully automated echo tool gained FDA clearance. Under Hare it raised a seed round led by Sequoia India and EDBI and a $15 million Series A led by IHH Healthcare, and Fujifilm built its software into its ultrasound products. He puts the goal in terms of access: "We want everyone to have equal access to high quality, inexpensive echo analysis."
Family in Singapore
Hare lives in Singapore with his wife, Carolyn Lam, and their son, Jordan. His advice to founders comes down to focus, learning, and endurance, and on the last of these he put it plainly: "in so many cases, I’ve seen that success is a matter of being the last man standing."