Health IT & practice operations · Agentic AI for general practice

Care GP

A Sydney company building AI agents to run the back office of Australian GP clinics. Live in 150+ clinics as of late 2025, pushing toward the country's 7,000 general practices.

A dancing clinic

One of Care GP's early customers liked its document-filing agent, Samantha, enough to film their front desk team dancing while she worked. Founder Melvin Chen points to that moment as proof the product struck a nerve. He told the accelerator Startmate: "We knew the problem was everywhere, but seeing it validated in clinic after clinic has been incredible. Samantha's not just saving time, she's creating joy."

The product itself is unglamorous by design. Samantha reads inbound referrals, pathology results, faxes and scanned letters and files them into a clinic's practice management system, a job once done by hand by a receptionist paid by the hour. Best Practice Software, whose BP Premier system is one of the two dominant practice platforms in Australian general practice, lists Care GP as an integrated partner and says Samantha cut the time documents sat before reaching a doctor's inbox and reduced processing errors, though it does not publish the underlying study.

The problem

Chen's pitch starts with a number from the broader health system: about a third of US healthcare spending, which he puts at roughly $1.3 trillion, goes to administration rather than care. He landed on general practice after moving to Australia in 2024 and talking to more than 150 healthcare providers across specialties, per Startmate's account of the founding. The pattern was consistent: clinics drowning in documents that had to be read, sorted and filed by staff who could be doing something more valuable. "Everyone wants to fix clinical care," Chen has said. "But if we don't fix the admin layer, we're just bottlenecking progress."

It is a crowded moment for that argument. AI scribes that transcribe consultations have drawn adoption and, in Australia, scrutiny over patient privacy, a concern raised in 2026 television coverage of AI listening tools in GP clinics unrelated to Care GP. Chen has said he avoided the scribe market and patient-facing chatbots in favor of the admin layer: referral routing, phone answering, billing and the plumbing clinics rarely discuss but cannot run without.

Founder

Melvin Chen is the company's sole publicly listed founder. His Y Combinator profile says he graduated valedictorian from Oxford with a triple major in materials, economics and management, made Forbes' 30 Under 30 Asia list for finance and venture capital in 2017, and worked in private equity at Terra Firma, Samena Capital and Goldman Sachs before co-founding Avigo and StarLake Group. A Forbes contributor profile independently confirms him as founder and managing partner of StarLake Group, active in Greater China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and confirms the Terra Firma start in London. PitchBook separately tracks a related entity, Star Lake Capital, as a Dubai private equity firm with three investments and two exits, the most recent being drug developer Maxwell Biosciences and, earlier, medical device maker HTL Holdings.

Startmate's profile of Chen describes him as "semi-retired, fresh off an IPO, contemplating a life of tennis tournaments and investing" before he started Care GP. A Care GP press release goes further, calling Chen "an experienced founder with a prior exit via a US$1.6bn IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange." No public filing found in this research ties Chen, Avigo, StarLake Group or Star Lake Capital to an IPO of that size. The one Nasdaq listing this research could trace to a Star Lake Capital portfolio company, HTL Capital Ltd, an India furniture distributor, filed for an IPO of about $19 million in 2024, far below the figure the release cites.

Beta to rollout

Startmate dates Samantha's beta exit to May 2025. By October 2025, Care GP said usage had grown 140 percent month on month and 20 percent week on week since launch, serving more than 150 clinics with zero churn and an 85 percent pilot-to-customer conversion rate, and said it had reached profitability. Startmate's own account, published around the same period, put growth at 175 percent month on month over five months, a figure that does not match the company's later press materials. Care GP's stated goal is to convert 750 active prospects into more than 600 new customers by December 2026, toward its addressable market of roughly 7,000 Australian GP clinics.

The company joined Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and has drawn early backing from Ryan Vo, chief executive of telehealth company Nuvo Health, who is both an angel investor and, per the company, an early customer, and from Startmate Ventures, described in company materials as Blackbird Ventures' pre-seed arm. No dollar amount for either has been disclosed, and no US Securities and Exchange Commission filing under Care GP's name was found, which is expected for an Australian company that has not raised from US investors under Regulation D.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: Care GP has a real, named customer and a confirmed integration with the country's leading practice system. Not verified: the scale of its growth, the security certification it cites, and, most notably, the size of the founder's claimed prior exit, where the one traceable public figure is far smaller than the release states.

What to watch

• Whether Care GP names clinics beyond Maxim Family Medical, or any customer count checkable against an outside source.
• Completion of the MedicalDirector integration, giving reach across both major Australian practice platforms.
• Any SEC Form D or Australian capital raise disclosure that puts a number on the "early-stage investment" already received.
• Whether the company or a journalist clarifies the size and nature of Chen's prior exit.

In their words

Related companies

• Dodo: Similar focus. A San Francisco startup building AI phone and text agents that answer calls, book appointments and refill prescriptions for veterinary and specialty clinics
• Clarion: Similar focus. A New York startup building AI agents that answer the phone for clinics, then finish the task on the other end: booking, refills, referrals, billing questions, written
• Liyfe: Similar focus. An AI chatbot built to triage cancer patients' symptoms between office visits, grown out of a medical physicist's telemedicine clinic for breast cancer care
• Denta: Similar focus. A one person Y Combinator company that set out to automate the back office of a dental practice, then repositioned itself within weeks of its public launch as a full

Sources

1. IndependentCare GP: AI agents to run primary healthcare operationsY Combinator company page · accessed Sep 25, 2026
2. IndependentScaling agentic AI for Aussie GPsMobiHealthNews, Adam Ang · Mar 11, 2025
3. IndependentCare GP aims to scale agentic AI across 7,000 clinicsPulse+IT, Reesh Lyon · 2026
4. IndependentFrom Sabbatical to Super Agents: How Care GP is Building the AI Enabled Future of Healthcare Provider OpsStartmate, Nora Schertwitis · Oct 1, 2025
5. IndependentMelvin ChenForbes profile page · updated Sep 2026, original list Apr 12, 2017
6. IndependentStar Lake Capital investment portfolioPitchBook · accessed Sep 2026
7. IndependentHTL Capital Seeks $19 Million U.S. IPO For India Furniture BusinessRenaissance Capital / LinkedIn republication, Nate Jones · 2024
8. IndependentCare GP - Best Practice partner listingBest Practice Software · Jun 2, 2025
9. CompanyCare GP Scales AI-Powered Healthcare Operations Platform to Reach 7,000 General PracticesNewsfile Corp via Yahoo Finance and Cantech Letter · Oct 29, 2025
10. CompanyCare GP to scale Agentic AI for Healthcare Ops to 7,000 GP clinics nationallyEIN Presswire via The National Law Review · Oct 21, 2025
11. CompanyCare GP websitecaregp.com.au · accessed Sep 25, 2026
12. Not foundABN Lookup search for Care GPAustralian Business Register · attempted Sep 25, 2026, site under maintenance