Episode
#538 - Why did two clinical AI founders bet on the paperwork instead? | Shaju Puthussery (CEO, LightSpun) & Deepak Ramaswamy (CTO)
- Podcast
- Slice of Healthcare
- Published
- Jul 29, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2087
- Processing state
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- https://share.transistor.fm/s/a6a3fe13
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Summary
Shaju Puthussery and Deepak Ramaswamy are the CEO and CTO of LightSpun, which is rebuilding the back-end engine of insurance processing as agentic AI infrastructure, starting in dental and moving into vision and ancillary benefits. Both came from Overjet, where Deepak was a co-founder and Shaju the first employee, and this conversation is largely about why they walked away from that thesis. Reading X-rays was the visible AI problem. Underneath it was a plumbing problem: claims that never reach clinical review because the documents were wrong, the provider record did not match, or the file never loaded cleanly. Two things in this episode surprised us. The first is that their most valuable asset was an accident. Shaju assumed credentialing was table stakes until a payer CEO told him it was blocking dentist onboarding, and one weekend later Deepak had an approach. That became the rail for roughly 87% of practicing dentists in the US and the provider data spine that feeds adjudication. The second is Shaju's answer to whether anyone profits from claim friction, which is not the cynical answer most people give. We discuss: Why Deepak argues the AI question is not either-or, and why world-class clinical review is worthless if the claim cannot get to it The moment their business model was confidently wrong: they built for benefits configuration, customers came back asking about credentialing, duplicate records, and file loads, and a startup that planned to do one thing had to bet on ten Why credentialing was never a Trojan horse for the provider data layer, how the same 200,000-dentist dataset gets monetized twice, and what obligation comes with being the thing the system quietly depends on The honest ceiling on model performance: 85 to 90% out of the box, and why the climb to…