Healthkind

Katie Herbert and Matt Zukowski built Akira, Canada's first virtual care provider, before it sold to TELUS Health in 2019; Herbert ran product and Zukowski was CTO, and both then worked on scaling TELUS Health Virtual Care. Healthkind came out of what they saw there. Herbert's framing on the TechTO stage in March 2026 is that patient communication is "the underbelly of almost every single patient journey" — the layer that determines whether someone attends, follows a care plan, or stays in a programme — and that nobody was building for it directly.

The product consolidates patient messaging channels, automates routine administrative traffic and personalises the rest. The company's own site claims 94% of patient messages handled by its AI and more than 36,000 messages a month at one client, with response times halved at another. The business model is tied to outcomes clinics already price: Herbert told TechTO that a cardiology clinic loses hundreds of dollars on a no-show plus roughly a hundred more in supply waste, so attendance is a line item, not a soft metric. Zukowski is direct that the current product depended on timing — an early engagement analysing a large paediatric clinic's communications data was impossible with pre-LLM language models, and the category opened up about six months later.