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This Startup Is Automating America's Biggest Hospitals

In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC General Partner Aaron Epstein sat down with Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, the Founder of Luminai (S20), which just raised a $38M Series B. Luminai is the AI transformation partner for health systems, automating the manual operational workflows for hospitals like Cleveland Clinic that still run on faxes and paper. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Aaron EpsteinhostKesava Kirupa Dinakaranguest
Apr 8, 202632mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Luminai automates hospital operations by turning faxes into workflows

  1. Luminai positions itself as an AI transformation partner for US health systems, moving operational workflows from manual human work to software-driven processes.
  2. A core example is hospital referral intake: Luminai triages incoming faxes, extracts and structures data, matches to the EHR, and routes/schedules across complex department structures.
  3. Dinakaran’s origin story—Rubik’s Cube world records, a Silk Road cycling trip, and immigrating young—reinforced a measurable, iterative approach to performance and ambition.
  4. Early survival and learning came from “hacking hackathons” through rapid stakeholder feedback loops, foreshadowing Luminai’s later customer-driven iteration style.
  5. Luminai evolved from a horizontal automation platform to a focused healthcare product with clear, high-value wedges, driven by credibility needs and an 80%+ healthcare customer mix.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Hospitals still run critical intake on outdated channels like fax.

Even elite systems like Cleveland Clinic receive referrals via fax, requiring teams to manually distinguish spam from urgent cases; this creates a high-friction bottleneck for patient access.

The wedge is turning unstructured documents into executable workflows.

Luminai’s value comes from converting faxes into structured data, then triggering routing, EHR matching, and scheduling actions through a workflow layer tailored to hospital operations.

Administrative waste is the economic justification for automation.

Dinakaran frames the opportunity as eliminating a large portion of healthcare’s administrative overhead (cited as ~30% of spend, over $1T), improving both hospital efficiency and speed-to-care.

Enterprise sales is about winning a champion, not “selling the enterprise.”

The key motion is finding forward-leaning internal leaders (often unusually fast-rising) who will take a bet and sponsor adoption, then expanding influence inside the institution.

Warm intros outperform cold outreach in conservative institutions.

Luminai relied heavily on second/third-degree connections, investor/advisor/customer networks, and systematic LinkedIn matching to secure trusted entry points into major health systems.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

We help large hospitals across the US move a large amount of their operational workflows from people to computers.

— Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran

The way that most of those patients get referred into the Cleveland Clinic is through a fax.

— Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran

We’ve become sort of the initial triage for all of these faxes.

— Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran

You’re not actually selling the enterprise, you’re actually selling an individual.

— Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran

The level of aggression and ambition you can have is probably 100 to 1,000 times larger than you think you should have.

— Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran

Automating hospital administrative operationsFax-based referrals and intake triageUnstructured-to-structured data transformationWorkflow engine and verticalized AI agentsHealthcare administrative waste (30% spend; $1T+)Founder origin story (Rubik’s Cube, UWC, Silk Road bike trip)Enterprise sales via champions and warm intros

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