Company leader
Akilesh Bapu
Co-founder
DeepScribe
Akilesh Bapu is a co-founder of DeepScribe, which writes the note from a specialty visit. He left a Berkeley master's program to build it after research on summarizing medical text with less training data.
Growing Up in Nacogdoches, Texas
He grew up in Nacogdoches, Texas, where his father was a medical oncologist. After electronic records arrived, his father came home later and dictated notes on the couch on weekends, and rides home from school or basketball practice stopped. "As a nerdy kid growing up, I would try to find solutions for him by searching the web and having him try them out," he said. In a small town, he said, it was easy to do what everyone else did, like paintball or hunting, and leaving for the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science opened up research and science fairs. In high school he and a friend built a Chrome extension for dyslexic readers that reached more than 5,000 active users in a few months.
Language Research at UC Berkeley
He studied electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and he started a master's there before leaving to work on the company. At Berkeley he researched natural language processing in Bin Yu's lab, taught the introductory iOS course, and directed engineering for Berkeley Mobile, the campus app. He spent a summer at Apple working on how iOS apps are translated into other languages.
A Summer Check from The House Fund
He and Matthew Ko had just shut down Delphi, a patent search engine, and kept talking about medical documentation when The House Fund offered checks to students who skipped summer internships to build a company. In 2017 they co-founded DeepScribe.