Backed by an Italian VC, the clinical intelligence startup is taking on surgical complications, starting with infections that cost the US health system up to $10 billion a year.
When Matteo Confalonieri, General Partner of Atlas AI VB Fund, wrote the first check into Bluevia Health’s pre-seed round, he was betting on a thesis that has become hard to ignore: surgery is one of the most data-rich and economically broken corners of healthcare, and the founders best positioned to fix it are operators rather than technologists.
Bluevia Health, founded by Ali Mahomed (CEO) and Abhyuday Roychowdhury (CTO), is building a clinical intelligence platform: a workflow operating system for perioperative care, covering the entire arc of a patient’s journey before, during, and after surgery. The company is currently piloting with surgical care providers across the US, with ambitions to scale the platform globally.
The company is part of the Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate program, Mayo Clinic’s flagship initiative for accelerating AI model validation and clinical readiness. Participants get access to one of the largest assembled biomedical datasets in the world, including over 15.1 million patient records, 1.65 billion clinical notes, and 12 billion radiology images, alongside expert mentorship and regulatory guidance.
The problem: surgery’s hidden tax
Surgical complications remain a major and underaddressed problem. In the United States alone, an estimated 160,000 to 300,000 surgical site infections occur every year. They are among the most common and costly hospital-acquired infections, accounting for roughly 20% of the total. A patient who develops an SSI is twice as likely to die, stays in hospital around 10 days longer, and adds at least $20,000 to their care bill.
Roughly one in five surgical patients globally experiences a post-operative complication, and most of those complications are considered avoidable. The economic damage runs into the billions on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe, with bed occupancy rates above 75%, arguably feels the squeeze even more acutely than the US.
This is the market Bluevia is going after.
A founder shaped by a personal story
Ali Mahomed’s path to surgical AI is unusually direct. He dropped out of Cambridge to work in startups, co-founding Heading Health, a network of insurance-covered psychedelic clinics that scaled to eight figures in annual recurring revenue, with backing from Thiel Capital, the family office of Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and a notable investor in psychedelic medicine.
The decision to start Bluevia was personal. After Ali’s uncle suffered a severe complication following a routine surgery, the experience reshaped how Ali thought about perioperative care.
He spent months on the ground, in operating rooms and back offices, before writing a line of code. The team he assembled reflects that approach: clinicians, operators, and engineers from Google Health, L.E.K. Consulting, and Harvard, alongside CTO Abhyuday Roychowdhury, who left senior engineering roles at Twitter and Yelp to deploy AI inside the UK’s National Health Service.
“You only really learn this space by being on the ground with clinicians, sitting in their workflows and listening to their actual pain points. A lot of software in healthcare gets designed for the buyer, not the user. We’re trying to do the opposite,” says Mahomed.
The Italian connection
Confalonieri’s fund, Atlas AI VB Fund, joined Bluevia’s pre-seed alongside Overlook Ventures, AI Seed, Rock Yard Ventures, and angels including co-founders of Anterior, Datavant, and other healthcare technology companies. For an Italian investor, the bet on a US-headquartered clinical AI company might seem unusual, but the thesis, Confalonieri argues, travels.
“What stood out about Ali and Abhyuday was the combination of mission focus and a genuinely data-driven approach. They aren’t building AI for the sake of building AI; they’re starting from a measurable, expensive clinical problem and working backwards. That’s the kind of discipline I look for, and it’s exactly what European healthcare systems will need as they integrate this generation of tools,” says Confalonieri.
What’s next
Bluevia is currently focused on scaling its workflow OS across surgical providers in the US, with the Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate program providing both the data infrastructure and the clinical credibility to push toward broader deployment. The company’s longer-term roadmap extends into hospitals and health systems globally, including European markets where surgical complication economics are arguably even more punishing.
Bluevia Health is building the OS for perioperative care, backed by Atlas AI VB Fund, Overlook Ventures, AI Seed, Rock Yard Ventures, and angels including co-founders of Anterior, Datavant, and a former Board Member of Mass General Brigham.
