We launched Foundation AI in early 2019, well before ChatGPT thrust AI into the limelight. We started with 4 guys (with names beginning with “V”), and are now nearly 200 people processing millions of pages each month and automating document-driven work for some of the largest and most renowned claims litigation firms in the world. Hear more of the origin story here.

We launched Foundation AI in early 2019, but the story really began about 5 years earlier. Vivek was a few years out of law school, working at a high-volume litigation firm and moonlighting with various startups in the Los Angeles area. A chance encounter with a distant cousin, Vamsi, kicked this whole thing off.

Vamsi and Venki, his friend from IIT (India’s most prestigious technical institution), were building Enlightiks, a healthcare AI Platform, and had just published a series of academic papers on the use of NLP to analyze medical records.

Vivek knew nothing about AI but was instantly amazed by what he saw. These guys were building systems that could extract structured data from unstructured medical documents. and read diagnostic images – work that took very smart people years to learn how to do.

And yet, at the law firm where Vivek worked, managing documents was a manual and extremely painful bottleneck. The firm had a revolving door of about 20 people, banging away at keyboards, searching, typing, emailing, and dragging and dropping to get inbound documents, attachments, and faxes into its practice management system. Even when done totally correctly, it was super slow, and it was done wrong all the time. Sometimes these mistakes were extremely costly.

Nobody enjoyed this work. This was exactly the type of thing that AI should be doing.

Vivek went back to school for his MBA, and on Day 1 he found himself in a group with Victor, the fourth “V.” Victor spent the prior 7 years in Thailand, first with the Peace Corps and then as Director of Operations for an international tech company. Victor was the Yin to Vivek’s Yang. They worked together on every project for 3 years. Vivek even showed him the crappy mailroom at his law firm.

Vamsi, Venki, and Vivek eventually sold Enlightiks, and Vivek was able to convince these much smarter tech guys, and Victor, an operations ninja, to start Foundation AI, to leverage artificial intelligence to attack the real problems with managing inbound documents for claims departments and law firms.

Fast forward to today, and Foundation AI transforms this tedious, manual process for Vivek’s prior firm and over a hundred others, automating millions of document-driven workflows each month.