Notable Systems

/ Startups / By
L-R: David Lippke, John Huggins, Trailhead, Steve Johnson & Team

Founders: John Huggins, Steve Johnson, & David Lippke
Founding: 2017
Mission: Liberating human potential with AI-assisted data entry
Employees: 20 & <10% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & <$10M raised
Investors: Founder funded & Grotech Ventures
Key Customers: Apria, Enovis, Crestone Capital
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$100M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Notable Systems is applying AI to a universal data extraction platform on a mission to liberate human potential with automated document processing. Created by industry veterans Steve Johnson (CEO), John Huggins (President), and David Lippke (CTO) this is a story about getting the band back together.

Steve & John built a company that AOL bought in the early 90s, then Steve & David worked together at AOL. You know, the company that put America online? Yeah, that team. David was the SVP of Systems Infrastructure and Steve was the VP of Technology. David was the person responsible for designing the system that put 1,000 people on the internet simultaneously and then scaled that up to millions of people. Steve joined AOL after inventing an image compression algorithm that took digital image uploading from 45 minutes to 6 seconds. He also led AOL’s Netscape acquisition. The company where Jim Barksdale, Jim Clark, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz all once worked. That team!

Notable is a remote startup but Founder & CEO Steve Johnson sits right here among us in Cambridge. Steve has been inventing and investing in technology companies for the last 30+ years. He attended Harvard’s Kennedy School and has gotten more involved in the local technology community recently as a Senior Fellow & Advisor at Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI.

Ok, back to Notable. It’s 2017. A friend had formed Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Orange County, CA, a joint venture to bring together a community hospital and two ambulatory service centers. The new management team asked Steve & friends to come in and look around to see if they had any ideas for automation. Their first (unofficial) professional services engagement. 

They discovered archaic IT systems and were quickly drowning in paper. In healthcare (and many other industries) there is still a TON of paper. It turns out the majority of clinics prefer writing physical notes. It’s easier to keep eye contact with patients and you can fit more information on a single page, among other logical use cases.

Steve’s team developed a system that allowed the clinic to digitally scan paper patient records at the end of each day. Then they wrote software to find all the relevant information on those pages and extract it into a structured digital form. Into that first prototype they built a very efficient turk system where they would flag uncertain fields and pass those fields to human puzzle solvers, similar to Amazon’s mechanical turk concept. It was a classic garage operation but it became clear that they were onto something.

Steve & the band took their prototype to DJO Global, the maker of DonJoy braces, to see if there was interest in developing their software further within the durable medical equipment field. DJO shared the same problems as the clinics with a sprawling data collection operation and inherent quality control issues. Their thousands of sales reps were still collecting paperwork at points of sale. Medical documents of every description were shipped abroad to hundreds of hourly workers to digitize. The company was losing 10s of millions of dollars on insurance reimbursement delays and expirations. 

The DJO contract was signed and Notable Systems was incorporated with a small team and founder funding. They brought DJO’s processing time from days to minutes and overall submission turnaround to insurance companies from 8 days to 2 days, dramatically increased the conversion rate for claim reimbursement. After 6 months their AI system got to 90% accuracy extracting dozens of fields from the haystack of paperwork. For the most important field extraction, they can often get to 99% all with software, dramatically reducing labor requirements.

This particularly helps relieve pressure on companies like DJO that need to over-staff for peak workloads. Using what’s known in AI as a “markup language,” they provide hints to the machine learning to teach their system what type of page it’s looking at and how to find the fields. Within 3 months training on a client’s workflow they can outperform the majority of manual digitization teams, saving time and money.

Notable Systems is on a mission to build a universal data extraction platform that can handle any page or document no matter what specialty or field. They’re defining a new AI category that identifies meaning with the super-accuracy that industry areas like law, financial services, and healthcare absolutely need. Notable Systems has built a platform that is meant to be “human assisted AI.” They’ve developed a patent pending invention called Snippets too which highlights when the AI brain is less confident and shows where in a document its guess came from to provide guidance around any areas that need double checking. The company’s founders recognize that no single AI approach such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be flawless, but using many techniques in tandem can create a nearly failsafe system that delivers commercial quality performance. From the very beginning, they’ve been on a mission to help their customers apply emerging advances in complex areas — like medical data extraction — to allow precious human time and judgment to move on to more productive things. 

In the same way that FedEx invented overnight delivery 50 years ago by building a cross city courier service, leading to a worldwide express mail service that has never been surpassed, Notable aspires to a similar lofty ambition. FedEx stayed ahead by incorporating technology and subsuming every new breakthrough into their operations to make their product & service faster. They built their company on rapid technology adoption and Notable is already solving customer problems by doing the same.

The Notable team has spent the last 5+ years validating and up leveling their technology, through careful customer selection, to handle enterprise grade use cases. Today they are building out two vertical markets in durable medical equipment and wealth management but there are many horizontal applications for their technology across industries like insurance, law & more when the timing is right.

They have quadrupled revenue this year versus last year and expect to do the same next year. This company is positioned to swing for the fences and they anticipate they’ll talk with investors about raising a substantial amount of growth capital in the not too distant future, building a new application for AI that no one else has yet ventured to do.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Notable Systems team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are Notable’s go to market expansion plans for the next 12 months?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team to the growth stage? 
  • What is the long term vision for the company? Will you continue to pursue durable medical equipment and wealth management companies or expand to other use cases?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Notable Systems you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team liberate more human potential by automating document processing in the decades ahead as a continuation of this age of digital transformation. All finger punchers applaud your efforts. See you around the Internet!

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