The Journey of Starting an AI Company

Vivek Rao, talks about his path from workers compensation attorney to co-founder and CEO of Foundation AI, an app that automates the manual process of collecting, categorizing and filing documents and unstructured data.  The software is used by law firms and insurance companies and utilizes a combination of artificial intelligence, optical character recognition (OCR) and computer vision to process incoming documents and email by type, time-sensitivity, and matter or claim.

Vivek, a native of Los Angeles, figured he would get into entertainment law, but ended up as a lawyer working in real estate and finance.

Later on, he started helping a workers compensation firm handle case files. In that role, he saw an opportunity to use AI and natural language processing (NLP) to automate the manual work of processing and filing the thousands of documents his firm received every week.

After the acquisition of a medical AI company he represented as corporate counsel, Vivek started wondering if a similar technology could be employed in the legal and insurance industries and after some ideation, Foundation AI was born.