Digital health · Physician-led telehealth
FutureClinic
A New York City startup that lets any licensed U.S. doctor open a chat-based clinic, with an AI assistant doing the intake and the doctor doing the diagnosing. It launched out of Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch and says it has raised $5 million, though the public funding record shows much less.
A dermatologist in his pajamas
On FutureClinic's own site, a patient can open a chat window and start typing to “Dr. Syed” before ever booking anything. There is no waiting room, no video call, no fifteen-minute slot. A short AI-run intake gathers the history first, then the doctor takes over.
Dr. Usama Syed, a board-certified dermatologist trained at Mount Sinai Hospital who went to medical school at Imperial College London, runs one of these clinics himself. “I’ve done over a thousand encounters on FutureClinic, and I actually think the care I can deliver on this platform is BETTER than what I did in person, because you can literally keep messaging me through every phase of the journey and I can track your progress,” he says on his FutureClinic profile page, adding that every reply carries what the company calls a Human Signature, a recorded video or audio clip so patients know it is really him and “not someone acting on my behalf,” even when, as he jokes, he is sometimes replying in his pajamas.
An earlier post attributed to him put a number on the early traction: “Usama launched his own FutureClinic (YC F24) as a Personal Dermatologist just two weeks ago and has already delivered 140+ real medical consultations across the U.S.,” according to a recap shared on LinkedIn in December 2025. Months later, his own FutureClinic profile put the total at more than a thousand encounters.
The problem it is aimed at
FutureClinic's pitch starts with a supply problem. Its Y Combinator launch post cites a projected shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036 and says 30 percent of physicians are expected to leave the field or go part time within five years because of burnout and inflexible schedules. Patient volumes per physician keep climbing, it argues, while the tools built to help, video telehealth and asynchronous messaging among them, have not lessened the load.
“Most AI healthcare companies have been focusing on administrative tasks (authorizations/ scribing). We’re focusing on the main bottleneck in healthcare - clinical expertise. Our AI thinks like a doctor,” the company wrote in its Launch YC post. The platform's own FAQ draws a line against faster, thinner alternatives: “Companies that promise replies in two or three minutes are usually chatbots with a doctor's approval button. We don't believe that's real healthcare.”
The company frames the target market as the roughly $50 billion U.S. telehealth industry, with physician content creators, doctors who already have an audience, as its stated beachhead.
Founders, and a title nobody agrees on
FutureClinic's Y Combinator company page names four active founders, three of them physicians. A Medium post published in May 2025 by Aakash Saraiya, a Susa Ventures fellow and former emergency physician who says he cold-messaged the team after finding them on LinkedIn, lays out the roles plainly: “Riyan Moussaoui, MD is the CEO, a physician by training as well as a former Senior AI Engineer at Anterior. He architected and built one of the first GenAI applications deployed to production in healthcare,” he writes, and “Usama Syed, MD is the COO and medical director, practices as a dermatologist at Mount Sinai, has experience as a healthcare executive and a viral social media following.” The post also names Hassan Mirza, MD as chief product officer, with a background training convolutional neural networks on ultrasound imaging at University College London, and Nabil Belahouane as chief technology officer, previously one of six site reliability engineers at GoCardless and a founding engineer at Documatic.
Yet the bio Y Combinator itself lists under “Founder/CEO” describes someone who is a “board-certified dermatologist, and faculty member at Mount Sinai, NYC,” a medical and business school graduate of Imperial College London with more than 300,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram and X, a description that matches Usama Syed's public profile, not Riyan Moussaoui's. A LinkedIn recap of the company's funding, shared in December 2025, goes further and states outright that FutureClinic was “Founded by Usama Syed, MD.” The public record does not settle who currently holds the CEO title.
The company's own launch post credits the group with 10,000-plus combined patient encounters and says its members previously helped open more than 40 physical clinics in New York over three years, though it does not name which ones.
From YC batch to a rebrand
FutureClinic went through Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch. Its Launch YC page and company page both still point doctors who want to sign up to “openclinic.com” and to a founders@openclinic.com email address, a leftover from an earlier name. The legal entity that delivers care, per the company's own HIPAA notice, is “Open Medical, P.C. and affiliated medical groups,” language that matches the OpenClinic name more than the FutureClinic brand the company markets under today. Crunchbase lists the company under the slug “openclinic” as well.
By the site's current description, the network spans more than 40 specialties across 28 states and Washington, D.C., with each doctor's license checked against the Federation of State Medical Boards, per the company. In December 2025, the company said it had raised $5 million, without naming a lead investor.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA, trials, federal grants, papers | No FDA 510(k) or PMA record, no registered clinical trial, no NIH or NSF award, and no PubMed entry found for FutureClinic, OpenClinic, or Open Medical as of Sep 25, 2026. | Not found |
| SEC Form D | No Form D filing located on SEC EDGAR under FutureClinic, OpenClinic, or Open Medical. | Not found |
| Y Combinator batch | Listed as a Fall 2024 company, team size 4, headquartered in New York City. | YC data |
| Reported funding | A December 2025 LinkedIn recap says the company “just raised $5M.” PitchBook logs two unpriced deals, an accelerator round dated Jan 1, 2024 and an early stage VC round dated Dec 2, 2024, with 10 listed investors, and its own FAQ answer puts total funding raised at $500K. | Differs from data provider |
| Care entity | The company's HIPAA notice names the practice as “Open Medical, P.C. and affiliated medical groups,” not a FutureClinic-named entity. | Company-stated |
| State licensure | Company FAQ lists 28 states plus Washington, D.C. as currently served, with per-doctor license checks run against the Federation of State Medical Boards. | Company-stated |
| Employee count | PitchBook lists 6 employees; Tracxn lists 13 employees as of Aug 31, 2026. | Data providers disagree |
| Revenue | GetLatka estimates about $550K in 2025 revenue, described as an estimate rather than a company disclosure. | Third-party estimate |
Read plainly: there is no regulatory clearance, registered trial, federal grant, or SEC filing tied to FutureClinic yet, which is normal for a company this young and this kind of product. What exists instead is a working consumer product with at least one named, verifiably practicing clinician, a Y Combinator credential, and funding and headcount figures that the company's own posts and third-party data providers do not agree on.
What to watch
- Whether a Form D or other public funding record ever appears to confirm the reported $5 million raise.
- Which named founder is publicly confirmed as CEO going forward.
- Independent press coverage; none was found in the outlets checked for this page.
- Growth beyond the network's current 28 states and Washington, D.C., and whether more clinicians are named publicly the way Dr. Syed is.
In their words
“I’ve done over a thousand encounters on FutureClinic, and I actually think the care I can deliver on this platform is BETTER than what I did in person, because you can literally keep messaging me through every phase of the journey and I can track your progress.”
Dr. Usama Syed, dermatologist, FutureClinic clinician profile · Company platform
“I launched my own FutureClinic as a Personal Dermatologist 2 weeks ago, and have already delivered real medical care across the U.S. 140 times.”
FutureClinic company LinkedIn page, Dec 2025 · Company statement
“Riyan Moussaoui, MD is the CEO, a physician by training as well as a former Senior AI Engineer at Anterior. He architected and built one of the first GenAI applications deployed to production in healthcare.”
Aakash Saraiya, Susa Ventures fellow, Medium, May 23, 2025 · Independent
“Usama Syed, MD is the COO and medical director, practices as a dermatologist at Mount Sinai, has experience as a healthcare executive and a viral social media following.”
Aakash Saraiya, Susa Ventures fellow, Medium, May 23, 2025 · Independent
“Usama launched his own FutureClinic (YC F24) as a Personal Dermatologist just two weeks ago and has already delivered 140+ real medical consultations across the U.S.”
LinkedIn funding recap, Dec 19, 2025 · Independent recap
“Companies that promise replies in two or three minutes are usually chatbots with a doctor's approval button. We don't believe that's real healthcare.”
FutureClinic website FAQ · Company-stated
“Most AI healthcare companies have been focusing on administrative tasks (authorizations/ scribing). We're focusing on the main bottleneck in healthcare - clinical expertise. Our AI thinks like a doctor.”
FutureClinic, Launch YC post · Company statement
Related companies
Sources
- YC dataFutureClinic: Personal doctors through chat, company page
- CompanyLaunch YC: FutureClinic, Healthcare that's 99% AI, 1% doctor
- CompanyFutureClinic homepage and FAQ
- CompanyFutureClinic doctors recruitment page
- CompanyFutureClinic HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices
- CompanyDr. Usama Syed, MD, clinician profile page
- CompanyFutureClinic LinkedIn company page post
- IndependentFutureClinic Raises $5M for Personalized Global Healthcare, recap post
- IndependentFellows, Founders and FutureClinic
- IndependentFutureClinic 2026 Company Profile: Valuation, Funding and Investors
- IndependentFutureClinic 2026 Company Profile
- IndependentFutureClinic Revenue 2025: $550K Est. ARR
- IndependentFutureClinic organisation profile
- IndependentFutureClinic company profile
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
