Why I Shut Down My Bootstrapped Health AI Startup After 7 Years: A Founder’s Postmortem

I was the Founder and CEO of Cydoc, a health AI startup, for seven years (April 2018 to August 2025). We achieved what many consider to be validation milestones: paying customers, patents, and demonstrated clinical impact. This article exists because I learned, painfully and expensively, that deploying health AI is only 20% of the challenge. [ ]