Andrew Ninh

UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s 2018 article writes that three months before his 18th birthday he had a spontaneous pneumothorax (a collapsed lung) and was taken to an intensive care unit for treatment, and learned afterwards that his heart rate had dropped significantly during the night; the monitoring system alerted the nurses, but because this condition commonly occurs in people who play sports or are of taller stature, the nurses had learned to ignore such alarms. The article notes that he stands more than six feet tall. The Orange County Business Journal’s October 2019 article also recounts the hospital stay and the alarms that went unheeded at night.⁠[1][2]

MedCity News’ 2021 article writes that the collapsed lung caused him to miss his high school graduation and that he concluded that health care desperately needed “IT systems that are safer for patients, physicians and nurses.” In the UCI Beall Applied Innovation article he says: “I knew there was a big opportunity because this was a problem,” and: “Back then everyone was buying these very expensive medical records.” The Orange County Business Journal’s October 2019 article writes that after this hospital stay he used AI to help the hospital improve its software; the same paper’s August 2019 special report writes that at 18 he decided to build an artificial intelligence deep learning software system.⁠[3][1][2][4]

The Orange County Business Journal’s October 2019 article writes that he dropped out of college and kept his focus on the health industry. His founder page on the Y Combinator website lists him as an alumnus of Arizona State University.⁠[2][5]

MedCity News’ 2021 article writes that he later met William Karnes, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, Irvine, who explained the standard of care in colonoscopy to him; in 2013 he, Tyler Dao and William Karnes teamed up to build a web interface for the polyp and colonoscopy quality database that William Karnes had collected over a ten-year period. UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s 2018 article writes that the two saw the potential to develop an AI product trained to identify polyps in real time; William Karnes had built the first version of the quality database Qualoscopy from more than 10,000 colonoscopies and 190,000 polyp images, and he calls Docbot “a super expanded beautiful version of what I had originally created.”⁠[3][1]

Accounts of when Docbot was founded differ: the Orange County Business Journal’s 2019 OC500 profile states that he founded DocBot “about 2013”; Chief Healthcare Executive’s 2018 article gives the company’s founding year as 2014; MedCity News’ 2021 article writes that the team officially launched the company in 2016.⁠[6][7][3]

The Orange County Business Journal’s October 2019 article writes that Ninh himself (chief executive), the two UCI gastroenterology experts William Karnes and Jason Samarasena, and his high school friend Tyler Dao formed Docbot together. Y Combinator’s company page lists the founders as Tyler Dao, William Karnes and Andrew Ninh. UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s 2018 article gives William Karnes as associate clinical professor of gastroenterology at the UCI School of Medicine, Tyler Dao as vice president of engineering, and Jason Samarasena as an interventional gastroenterologist at UCI who uses polyp photos to train a deep learning model; Chief Healthcare Executive’s 2018 article gives William Karnes as director of colonoscopy quality at UC Irvine.⁠[2][8][1][7]

On June 4, 2018, an article in Chief Healthcare Executive presented Docbot’s launch of Qualoscopy and described him as the company’s co-founder and chief executive. The article writes that Qualoscopy is an AI workflow suite for colonoscopy that applies AI to polyp detection and connects with electronic health records to document procedures and quality measures automatically; it can integrate with Epic and Cerner records systems and can also run as a standalone program. The system had been tested and refined for months at UC Irvine and was then in a public beta with physicians at several medical centers; the company’s stated target was a fully functional system by September 2018, and Docbot was also developing tools for allergy specialists. He held that the polyp-detection algorithms, built on UC Irvine’s colonoscopy database, were ready for clinical testing and that the company’s first priority was “multicenter studies to demonstrate that Qualoscopy improves polyp detection”; William Karnes called Qualoscopy “a game changer.”⁠[7]

On June 6, 2018, UCI Beall Applied Innovation published an article on Docbot’s deep learning system: it detects polyps in real time during colonoscopy and gives feedback while the physician watches the screen; William Karnes says that it is up to 98 percent accurate and takes about 10 milliseconds to process an image, four times faster than real-time operation requires. William Karnes’ abstract “Robust Real-time Polyp Detection and Classification During Colonoscopy Using Deep Learning” reports 96.4 percent accuracy in polyp detection and 94 percent accuracy in predicting precancerous pathology from images; in February 2018 he received the Institute for Clinical & Translation Science (ICTS) Pilot Award for it, and he presented it in a lecture at Digestive Disease Week in Washington, D.C. The article writes that conventional pathology takes about two weeks, while the system determines “in fractions of seconds” whether a polyp is precancerous; William Karnes estimates that the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry spends more than $1 billion a year on pathology samples. Docbot’s technology was then in use at several facilities in the region, including UCI Medical Center, and the aim was to expand into ambulatory surgery centers, community hospitals and teaching centers and eventually into other image-intensive fields such as bronchoscopy.⁠[1]

The article describes his technology as “behind-the-scenes” technology for improving medical documentation and record keeping, and writes that Ninh calls the system formed by combining his back-end technology with William Karnes’ real-time data interface currently “the only system that can make self-learning AI possible.” He also says: “Detecting the polyp and determining if it’s precancerous in real time has the potential to save a lot of pathology costs”; the Orange County Business Journal’s 2019 OC500 profile also printed this sentence.⁠[1][6]

Y Combinator’s company page lists Docbot in its Winter 2019 (W19) batch. The Orange County Business Journal’s October 2019 article writes that he took the company through UCI Applied Innovation’s Wayfinder program and the Y Combinator accelerator program; MedCity News’ 2021 article writes that the company raised a seed round in 2019 through Y Combinator.⁠[8][2][3]

The seed amount differs between reports: the Orange County Business Journal’s August 2019 special report writes that Docbot graduated from UCI’s Wayfinder incubator and, after completing the Y Combinator accelerator, received $2.045 million in seed funding; the same paper’s October 2019 article writes that Docbot raised $2 million in a seed round from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Bold Capital Partners.⁠[4][2]

On February 24, 2019, the Orange County Business Journal wrote that Irvine-based Docbot had received a $225,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation to expand its study of upper gastrointestinal conditions; the company was based at UCI Applied Innovation’s The Cove. The article writes that he and William Karnes found that doctors using their software detected 20 percent more polyps during colonoscopies; the software works much like face detection, prompting doctors to look more closely at certain areas. The article writes that Docbot had earlier raised $500,000 from Kleiner Perkins and several other investors; he said that the company’s $5 million Series A round should close in early April.⁠[9]

On April 25, 2019, UCI Beall Applied Innovation wrote that Docbot, a Wayfinder startup, had received a $225,000 SBIR Phase 1 grant from the National Science Foundation; the company would give part of it to UCI and use the rest to build its machinery and team, and he hoped to build and validate the AI for clinical trials to prove that the product works. He said: “Getting an SBIR grant from the NSF is a game changer for us,” and that the company would use every dollar to advance care for patients with Barrett’s esophagus. The Orange County Business Journal’s August 2019 special report writes that the grant would support a clinical trial focused on a serious complication of gastroesophageal reflux disease.⁠[10][4]

On July 10, 2019, the Thiel Foundation announced its 2019 class of Thiel Fellows; he is item 3 on the list, with Fountain Valley, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, as his hometown and San Francisco, California, as his current location, in healthcare, medical devices and health IT, with Docbot as his project. The announcement writes that Docbot has developed better computer vision software to save people from colon and stomach cancers by helping colonoscopists identify more precancerous polyps.⁠[11]

The Orange County Business Journal’s October 2019 article writes that he was one of the 22 people named Thiel Fellows that July, and that the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry awards $100,000 each to young people who want to build new things.⁠[2]

On August 12, 2019, the Orange County Business Journal’s “Innovator of the Year Awards” special report listed him among the nominees for its 2019 Innovator of the Year Award, presenting Docbot’s real-time AI software as helping colonoscopists find more lesions and classify the lesions by malignancy, and stating that AI colonoscopy can identify up to 20 percent more abnormalities than a traditional test.⁠[4]

On September 25, 2019, the Orange County Business Journal’s list of 2019 winners included Andrew Ninh, co-founder and chief executive officer of “Docbot in Irvine.” The paper’s October article writes that he was one of the five winners of that year’s Innovator of the Year awards and the youngest of the five.⁠[12][2]

On October 6, 2019, the Orange County Business Journal published an article on Docbot, writing that its AI detects cancer with 98 percent accuracy in milliseconds and that Qualoscopy is the largest database in the world for visual pathogenic polyp detection; Docbot was not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration and was indicated for investigational use only, and UCI Medical was using its technology. The article also writes that the American Cancer Society ranks colon cancer as the third most prevalent cancer, with 97,000 new cases in the previous year; that UCI says 90 percent of colon cancers could be prevented with a routine colonoscopy and estimates that $1 billion is spent annually on these routine pathologies; and that about half of the population recommended for screening is likely to have precancerous polyps that Docbot can detect.⁠[2]

On December 11, 2019, the Orange County Business Journal’s OC500 listing included him as CEO of DocBot, describing him as a young entrepreneur who developed AI technology to detect abnormalities in endoscopic procedures and listing his 2019 Innovator of the Year Award from the paper and Docbot’s $225,000 SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation.⁠[6]

On May 24, 2021, MedCity News published an interview with Docbot’s chief executive, Andrew Ritter, which calls Ninh “The original co-founder” of the company. The article writes that his background in bioinformatics and natural language processing led the team to use William Karnes’ data to generate AI algorithms that automate the detection of polyps and other lesions and report colonoscopy quality, algorithms that became the UltivisionAI platform; Andrew Ritter says that the company had recently closed a $4 million Series A round led by Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, bringing its total funding to $8.5 million.⁠[3]

As of November 2026, Y Combinator’s company page lists Docbot’s status as Acquired and its location as Los Angeles; his founder page states: “Andrew Ninh was the founder of Docbot which went through YC in W19.”⁠[8][5]

The Orange County Business Journal’s 2019 OC500 profile gives his father as Thanh Ninh and his mother as Tammy Tran; his favorite book is “Twilight,” and the musical group of his youth is Nickelback.⁠[6]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aninh (opens in a new window).⁠[5]