Amitha Kalaichandran Founder, Evra Health
Amitha was an integrative medicine-trained physician, an epidemiologist, and author before she became a “reluctant” startup founder in 2025. Amitha discusses her moonshot vision for universal primary healthcare in the US and why The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia ranks among Silicon Valley’s most eminent founders.
Tell us about Evra: who is it for and how does it work?
Our goal is to provide the infrastructure for universal primary care.
Currently, Evra connects the dots between the data that people share, providing evidence and insights that an integrative medicine physician would share, but as an AI health companion, not a doctor.
At a minimum, individual users complete a brief intake form, sharing their conditions, allergies, medications, and food preferences. If you want to share your medical record, lab tests, or data from wearables, you can. Evra then gives you a personalized action plan to meet your health goals.
Evra can be helpful for healthcare professionals, including therapists, to see if their patient is struggling with everything from mood to chronic conditions, like high blood pressure and diabetes. We’re working on an enterprise product now for providers and doctors so they can see how their patients are doing between visits and specifically surface concerning signals that warrant an in-person checkup.
How does Evra’s service in the US and internationally compare?
In the US, we offer meal delivery. We partner with Cost Plus Drugs for prescriptions and LabCorp for affordable lab tests. We partner with a national behavioral health provider for therapy, which we’re hoping to expand. Evra has a HIPAA-compliant chatbot function to answer questions.
Our app is also available free of charge to anyone with a smartphone in 175 countries—a user who knows they have high cholesterol or diabetes can use Evra to scan a meal or ask a question.Evra means “for everyone,” because access is really important. I was born in England where people have the National Health Service (NHS) and I grew up in Canada, which also has universal healthcare. While those systems aren’t perfect, I really care about making sure that we serve the 99% and as many people globally as possible.
Tell us about your journey to establishing a healthcare startup.
I would call myself a reluctant founder—it took me a month to sit with the idea and ask myself if I really wanted to take this hard path. I’m a physician by training, and I worked in epidemiology and public health before I went to medical school in Canada. I burnt out during my residency: the culture and 36-hour shifts were extremely challenging. Shows like The Pitt have given people more appreciation of how tough that environment is, even outside of caring for patients. I was quiet, I was dim, I was depressed. For the first time, I was diagnosed with workplace-induced anxiety and depression, and my cholesterol had climbed, but not high enough to get a statin. I’d spent years studying how to get people healthy at medical school, and there wasn’t a pill or surgery that would help me—I needed to heal myself.
I took a step back to figure things out. I completed an integrated medicine fellowship where I learned about sleep, nutrition, and mindfulness, and so on; it took me a long time to reverse everything and get back on the right path. Getting out of that environment effected the biggest change on my health. Every single person I know in a toxic workplace situation becomes a shadow of themselves. We needed to talk more about how impactful our workplaces are to our mental health, and support people who make the difficult decision to quit or to transition.
You published your book On Healing in January 2025—how did that relate to your transition from physician to founder?
I found writing to be an incredible outlet on my healing journey. I completed a journalism fellowship and started covering wellness for the New York Times, Wired, Fast Company, The Atlantic, and other titles, which led to a book deal in 2019. Through the book writing process, I built a database of research papers that I analyzed and synthesized. That database became something that we could use to fine-tune a foundational model, as the data wasn’t public.
My book toured 12 different cities where I spoke to around 500 everyday Americans. It was a humbling experience, and during those discussions I learned how many people were struggling with health issues and access to healthcare. People wanted to connect the dots between a personal health story and what they needed to do to support their wellbeing, and were piecing things together through Google search and later, ChatGPT. Even with a growing choice of apps and product solutions, they always felt there was something missing. That’s when the light bulb went off.
Why did you decide to base Evra in DC?
I established Evra in New York in early 2025 as a solo founder, although I have a founding team. I moved the company to DC to be at the intersection of healthcare, AI, and the decision-making around both—being in those rooms has been really important.
We’re raising right now, and some of our advisors are based in the Bay Area—James Landy, who heads the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and Tyce Walters, who’s at OpenAI in San Francisco—so I’m here for the summer, meeting with potential collaborators and partners. I’d love to split my time between DC and SF for the best of both worlds. San Francisco is much more tech-focused, and it’s been great to connect with founders, especially through CANOPY, who know what you’re going through.
Evra is 15 months old. How will you maintain and develop Evra’s workplace culture as you grow?
What keeps things sticky is that sense of belonging. Right now, everyone seems very attached to our big mission: providing the infrastructure for universal primary care, but I’m bullish on culture and always exploring how we can unite better as people.
I think more companies should be formed like a band where people own their role and then harmonize together, instead of only hiring people for their skills. We just brought on a talented software engineer to audit our codebase (we hadn’t brought a new engineer on in 12 months). He happens to be a guitarist, too, and other engineers loved his report and suggestions: it was like having an artist go through the backend and make it all more beautiful, less bloated, and smoother. His work is helping amplify the talents of the rest, and keeping everyone in a healthy growth mindset with their skills and learnings.
Are there any major milestones you’d like to share?
We have a provisional patent we just filed with global law firm Cooley. We have three research posters, one of which was just accepted a few weeks ago. The first two are around AI for lifestyle medicine and AI for preventative cardiology. The third one is on mental health and behavioral health, which I’m especially excited about. I see a divide between people who don’t believe we should use AI or chatbots for therapy and those who do, especially knowing many people can’t access a therapist. Personally, I’m excited about harmonizing AI and human care, rather than replacing humans.
Evra can help people handle anxiety, stress, and behavioral health conditions, not as a therapist, or explicitly not through therapy, but by providing lifestyle coaching through the app and detecting if someone would benefit from human care. We have a very low threshold for saying: click here to connect with a human virtually or in person in your zip code.
We’ve had some really interesting discussions with people in Congress around how we can support responsible AI, minimizing harms and maximizing benefits in healthcare use cases, specifically. I would say that’s a milestone in this climate: healthcare and specifically the intersection of healthcare and AI is truly a bipartisan issue. I believe there’s a way to meet at a place where we can, for the first time in our lives, make it possible for every American to be on track to live 100 healthy years.
What are the key challenges in your industry?
The crisis in healthcare is one of both creativity and clutter. I think oftentimes when people talk about healthcare, or even say the blue sky words like “universal healthcare”, it’s so triggering because most people think of HMOs, insurers, payers—all things that don’t exist in many countries. We have too many cooks in the kitchen.
To me, it’s more manageable when we approach one achievable piece with a creative mindset and the tools at hand: working to ensure everyone has access to primary healthcare, a key component behind chronic disease. I believe we have the tools to offer a “basic minimum” package of this care to every uninsured person in the US.
Are there any game-changing updates coming down the pipe—technology advances, regulatory changes—that will further your goals?
Two things. First, everyday consumers now have access to their data and are more informed than five or ten years ago when physicians were the gatekeepers. That’s an incredible opportunity: when you’re informed, you’re allowed to be more curious, you have more agency.
We’re multifaceted people. I am one woman, and I may not just be dealing with perimenopause, but also anxiety, high cholesterol, and other obstacles. Our bodies are constantly whispering to us, but being able to decode the message is a challenge.
Evra sits at the point of translating this information into meaningful action steps for the individual while removing friction behind taking that action.
The second thing is that policy is shifting around the use of AI for healthcare and around antiquated policies on data sharing. I think this administration has advocated strongly for us as individuals to access our data and has taken a stand against things like data blocking. There are some really smart and committed people working on healthcare across party lines, and it’s really exciting to be building at the intersection where everything is happening.
Why did you choose CANOPY as your shared office space in SF this summer?
I saw the FiDi location sign while scouting for a coworking space. The staff there was really sweet and said I should check out Jackson Square, where lots of founders are based. I took a tour, and I was really impressed, so here I am! I’ve met some incredible people: Tobi and Raden on the CANOPY team are amazing.
James Gee, Global Partnerships Manager and Silicon Valley Chapter Director at Startup Grind, messaged me on LinkedIn after overhearing me talking in the CANOPY office. As someone who’s here without my entire team in the city, seeking community in a beautiful space to work, I can’t imagine being anywhere else. Being in San Francisco right now is just a cherry on top—it feels like a place of possibility in a way it probably hasn’t felt like since the 1960s.
What’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned in your career?
The environment that you base yourself in is as influential as any inherent skill set or competency or talent that you have. If you plant a beautiful seed in a toxic wasteland, your flower won’t grow well. This was an important lesson I learned in my medical residency: I had lucked out in being smart and being in places where people wanted me to succeed, and so the moment that you find yourself in a different situation, you realize that your achievements are at least 50% due to the environment—and I’ll include mentors in that.
If you’re struggling or not thriving in a career, look at your environment, look at your workplace, and start asking yourself questions about what you may want to change. You may have more agency than you realize. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, wrote this really great essay in 2008 called Cities and Ambition. The thesis is that if you’re interested in certain things, you should go to the city that’s known for that—New York for finance or fashion, SF for counterculture and technology. Lots has changed since 2008, and New York is definitely a tech hub as well, as is Washington, DC, but I believe the principle applies.
Is there a musician, band, or album you recommend to everyone?
I’m a new fan of The Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia in part because of the music—most of their tracks put you in a funny zone where you can access creativity—but more because I think lead singer Jerry Garcia was probably one of the greatest founders to come out of Silicon Valley. Formulating the band, he brought a bunch of misfits together: someone who is a jazz player, someone who was a great drummer, but in different ways than most. The Dead were able to create a worldwide movement of people who followed them around—talk about stickiness!—and the music was the product. He valued team cohesion, and fostered the unique talents of each member. Importantly, he also paid little to no attention to “competition” or copycats—he believed it distracted the group from the act of creating new music and improving their sound. It’s been influential in how I’ve been thinking about creating this company: bringing a bunch of talented people together to create something new.
What’s the best book you’ve ever read?
It’s a weird one, but I’ll share it because I think more people should read it: Reality Transurfing. It’s by a Russian mystic philosopher and explores themes of manifestation, bringing in quantum mechanics and quantum physics. I find it applicable to entrepreneurship and how we think about our personal lives, and how we’re constantly in this dance between our conscious experience and our environment, and how much impact we can have energetically. I can be a little woo-woo: I believe in manifestation, and I also love science. It reads like a mediocre translation (since it was translated from Russian), so I recommend listening to the audiobook.
*
Follow Dr. Amitha Kalaichandran work on LinkedIn, on Instagram @DrAmithaMD, and her website.
Follow Evra Health on LinkedIn and on Instagram @evrahealth.