Company leader
Kai Van Lieshout
Co-founder and CEO
Lyrebird Health
Kai Van Lieshout is the co-founder and chief executive of Lyrebird Health, a Melbourne company whose AI scribe drafts clinical notes, letters and referrals for doctors. Forbes put him on its 2026 30 Under 30 Asia list for AI.
A Diagnosis and a Waitlist
Late in 2022, as a 21-year-old university student, he was diagnosed with a chronic illness he had lived with his whole life. When he sought treatment, he learned the wait to see a specialist would be more than 12 months. He asked his GP why, and the answer stayed with him: "My doctor was spending hours each day on paperwork instead of seeing patients."
He came to see the delay as a workflow problem as much as a shortage of doctors. "It turned out, the average doctor spends about 30-40% of each day just on documentation," he said.
A Student Hackathon
A former engineer at Tesla, he joined the Startmate Student Fellowship in early 2023, a national program that encourages young Australians to consider startups. The first version of Lyrebird came out of its two-week hackathon, where he met Linus Talacko, a 20-year-old computer science student. The two had been a year apart at the same primary and secondary schools.
By late June 2023, Lyrebird was one of 13 companies in Startmate's Winter 2023 cohort and was being tested at GP clinics in Melbourne. On a trip to San Francisco that year he had a one-on-one meeting with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman at OpenAI's headquarters.
Growing Lyrebird Health
Lyrebird went from about 900 consults a week in 2023 to more than 28,000 a day, with integrations into Best Practice and Gentu, two widely used Australian GP systems. In 2025 it closed a $12 million first venture round led by Five V Capital and Octopus Ventures, and it began expanding to the UK and to King's Hospital in Dubai.
His goal is for clinicians to spend their time with patients, and he has said that "doctors should spend virtually 100% of their time looking patients in the eye and delivering care". He sums up Lyrebird's purpose this way: "Our vision is global, but our mission is personal: support the people who care for people."