3/19/2026 · 43 min
15 Years of Medical Rigour Over Hype: ADA Health's Daniel Nathrath on Building AI That Actually Works
Prove It! with Daniel Nathrath, Founder & CEO, Ada Health
Audio coming soon · 43 min
Digital health is littered with extraordinary claims that never collide with evidence. Ada Health is one of the rare exceptions. Paul Wicks sits down with Daniel Nathrath, founder and CEO of Ada Health, to unpack what it actually takes to build medical-grade AI over 15 years without cutting corners on safety, rigour, or evidence.
Daniel opens up about why he — a lawyer by training with a background in consumer internet — ended up building one of the world's most clinically validated symptom assessment platforms: the early decision to build for doctors first, the hard lesson that healthcare is nothing like e-commerce, and the moment his Berlin office became global news when a giant aquarium exploded in the lobby.
Topics covered
- Why Ada chose a curated medical knowledge base over a pure LLM — and why that's now its biggest competitive advantage
- How Ada eliminates hallucinations entirely, and why pharmaceutical partners won't work with companies that can't say the same
- The "patient finder" model: shortening the diagnostic odyssey for rare disease patients from 7–10 years to something far more humane
- What 40 million assessments, a Class IIa medical device certification, and 20+ peer-reviewed papers actually mean in practice
- The real conversations Daniel plans to have at JP Morgan Healthcare, and why early patient identification is the future of pharma