Voices of Healthcare · #14
Andre Esteva
Co-founder and CEO
ArteraAI
Andre Esteva is co-founder and chief executive of ArteraAI, which builds tests that use a digitized pathology slide and clinical data to estimate how a cancer will behave and whether a therapy is likely to help. As a Stanford doctoral student he co-led a 2017 Nature paper that matched dermatologists at classifying skin cancer from images.
Graduating First in Engineering at Texas
He graduated with highest honors in electrical engineering and pure mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was engineering valedictorian. He went on to a PhD in computer vision at Stanford.
Classifying Skin Cancer
At Stanford he and Brett Kuprel, with dermatologists including Roberto Novoa and Justin Ko, trained a network that classified skin lesions as accurately as dermatologists, published in Nature in January 2017. "My main eureka moment was when I realized just how ubiquitous smartphones will be," he said. "What if we could use it to visually screen for skin cancer?"
Spinning Artera Out of Salesforce
He held engineering roles at Google Research, Sandia National Laboratories, and GE Healthcare, and from October 2017 to January 2019 he co-founded Cresta, which builds AI software for contact-center agents. From September 2019 to August 2021 he was head of medical AI at Salesforce Research, where the technology behind Artera was incubated before it spun out.
He has led ArteraAI since September 2021. Its tests take a digitized histopathology image and estimate prognosis and treatment response, and they are in National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines, reimbursed by Medicare, and cleared by the FDA. In 2025 TIME put him on its TIME100 Health list.
Links
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