Otomo Health

MIT, Sloan School of Management

Industry: Healthcare / Digital Health

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Mike Sanchez (CEO), Kiyo Takanishi (CBO), Kevin Yang (COO); all three founders are MIT Sloan School of Management MBAs Class of 2025

Brief Description of Solution: Otomo is an AI-native control tower for patient engagement that automates all soft interactions for specialty clinics and health systems including outreach, reminders, follow-ups, and scheduling. Our service allows clinics to see more patients, grow revenue, and never compromise on the quality of care.

Funding Dollars: $2 Million

What led you to launch this venture? I came to MIT Sloan School of Management to pursue my MBA with the intent of founding a company. What I didn’t expect was finding my co-founders before I even had a concrete idea. I first teamed up with Kevin and Kiyo during a pharmaceutical case competition, and we made it into the finals. Through that experience, it became obvious that we worked exceptionally well together. We wanted to build something bigger as a team.

Around that same time, my father was going through a difficult diagnostic journey. Seeing firsthand how hard it was for patients and families to navigate the healthcare system pushed us toward the problem we’re now solving at Otomo: closing the gap between clinical capacity and patient needs through better engagement.

From there, we leaned heavily on the MIT entrepreneurial ecosystem including participation in MIT Sandbox, which provides seed funding, mentorship, and tailored entrepreneurship education, and MIT Fuse, a three-week hands-on startup sprint. This led to our participation in delta v, MIT’s capstone educational education accelerator. Otomo Health spun out of this.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with your venture? It’s hard to pick just one, but the milestone that really stands out is going from a rough idea on a whiteboard to engaging over 35,000 patients every month.

What makes this meaningful for us isn’t just the number; it’s knowing that real patients are getting seen, scheduled, and supported because of our product. And none of that would have happened without the incredible people around us: our team, our advisors, our customers, and the broader MIT community.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? One of our biggest challenges has been to build “trustworthy” AI, given that it is an industry in its infancy and mistakes can lead to serious implications. Moreover, the healthcare industry has every reason to be skeptical of new technology, especially when it directly touches on patient care.

We’ve tackled this challenge in three ways:

1. Clear objectives: For every deployment, we define very specific, measurable outcomes with our customers, so everyone understands what “good” looks like.

2. Strict guardrails: We tightly constrain our AI systems so that every interaction operates within carefully designed workflows and approved messaging.

3. Human-in-the-loop: We keep clinicians and staff in the loop, especially early on, to monitor interactions, fine-tune behavior, and ensure the system works exactly as intended.

By combining these elements, we’ve not only earned our customers’ trust, but we’ve also shown that AI can safely outperform what was previously possible using only human labor.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? The MBA program has been even more impactful than we expected. It gave us time and space to experiment, a two-year buffer where we could test ideas, make mistakes, and iterate without needing everything to work on day one. It also opened doors to non-dilutive funding, classes, mentors, and countless touchpoints with clinicians, operators, and investors.

Just as importantly, being surrounded by other founders and operators pushed us to aim higher and move faster. I’m not sure we would have worked on this exact business, or even progressed this far, without the structure and support of the MBA program.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? One of the most practical classes for us has been Building an Entrepreneurial Venture (15.378) aka “GSD”.  The class put us in a room with other founders of startups at a similar stage and paired us with experienced mentors who did not hesitate to challenge us.

The biggest lesson from GSD was the power of structured accountability: showing up every week with real metrics, real customer conversations, and real progress. It forced us to turn “good ideas” into concrete experiments, and then into a real business.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? We’ve been fortunate to be supported by many professors, entrepreneurs-in-residence, and mentors at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Key to our journey was

Bill Aulet, Professor of the Practice and the Managing Director of the Trust Center, who believed in us early on. When we applied to Fuse, he not only brought us into the program, but also made a real effort to integrate me into the MIT entrepreneurial ecosystem. That opened doors to mentorship, teaching opportunities (as a TA for some of his classes), and a chance to give back to other founders. Bill and the Martin Trust Center have consistently been some of our strongest advocates.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? The MIT entrepreneurial ecosystem has been very helpful in incubating Otomo having provided non-dilutive capital through programs like Sandbox and delta v, giving us the freedom to explore, and test and refine our ideas. Just as importantly, it has connected us with incredible people — faculty, clinicians, operators, and fellow students who have helped shape both our product and our go-to-market approach. We’ve also benefited from a deeply collaborative community where founders openly share lessons, introductions, and even mistakes so everyone can grow faster together.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? Our founding team shares a simple but ambitious goal: we want Otomo to positively impact as many lives as possible.

We envision Otomo as the connective tissue that underpins patient engagement across clinics and health systems, a fabric that helps healthcare teams keep up with the growing patient population without burning out staff or compromising care.

At its core, we built this company to bridge the widening gap between limited clinical resources and rising patient needs.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? I wish I had fully understood, earlier, just how much people and ecosystem matter compared to the initial idea. Ideas evolve. Products pivot. Markets shift. But the team you build and the way you use the resources around you often determine whether you can adapt quickly enough.

A professor once shared a thought that stuck with me:You can succeed with a flawed product if you have the right team and support, but you can fail even with a great product if you don’t.

That insight has proven true over and over again in our journey.

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