Illinois students launch InvoGenix, an AI startup tackling $600M healthcare paperwork crisis

A diverse team of five Illinois undergraduate students have co-founded InvoGenix, an AI-powered tool designed to fix a huge problem: the deluge of healthcare administrative paperwork, which leads to physician burnout and drains the US healthcare system of over $600 million annually.

This is the story of how these budding entrepreneurs turned an idea into a funded startup by taking advantage of a Gies Business-led entrepreneurial ecosystem that includes iVenture Accelerator, faculty experts, health-tech experts, funding resources, and University partnerships.

Their goal is to make a significant impact on American healthcare and become one of the next generation of Illini business innovators, a legacy of alumni that includes the founders of PayPal, Mozilla, YouTube, and Seibel Systems.

Poets&Quants agrees with InvoGenix’s potential, recently naming it one of the nation’s Most Disruptive Business School Startups of 2025.

Identifying a billion-dollar problem

Sofia Marin was a first-year student studying finance when John Renaldi, a founding member of Illini Angels, grabbed her attention.

“I have a billion-dollar business idea for you,” he said as they shared tacos at a networking dinner. Renaldi urged her to think about how AI could reduce documentation time and prevent costly paperwork errors.

Within days, Marin quickly confirmed that medical billing in the US was full of flaws that impact both the caregiver and patient. She soon realized finding a workable solution would require expertise beyond her own.

“My passion will always be healthcare, but as a freshman I couldn’t yet fluently speak the language of business,” she said. “I needed to learn how generate cash, analyze a market, and understand the customer discovery process.”

Marin then connected with like-minded thinkers through campus organizations like buildIllinois, a community that connects student entrepreneurs, and Zero2One, an incubator program for student founders.

Within 60 days, the core team representing four University of Illinois colleges was set: Alex Cerullo and Krutang Thacker (Computer Engineering), Alex Kim (Chemistry and Biology), Sofia Marin (Business), and Ananya Kavatekar (Information Sciences + Data Sciences). They began reaching out to healthcare stakeholders through the lens of their respective majors.

“From early on, we set ourselves up well for our long-term goals by keeping inter-team relationships strong,” said Cerullo. “Some of us cold email all night, setting up coffee chats and customer discovery calls. Others drive up our model’s accuracy, fueled by Red Bull.”

Manu Edakara, director of iVenture Accelerator, who has guided thousands of young entrepreneurs, says InvoGenix’s group dynamics has been integral to their success.

“Their leadership group is truly cross-functional, bringing together deep and diverse expertise, and I have rarely seen a core team synthesize differing perspectives so effectively,” said Edakara. “They listen well, integrate feedback quickly, and move from debate to execution with uncommon clarity.”

The team soon realized developing a working proof of concept in the healthcare space meant overcoming the core technical challenge of gaining access to sensitive patient information in a HIPAA-compliant way so that their model achieved high AI accuracy.

Their solution was found right on campus: the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) Nightingale computer cluster. It offers researchers a secure way to temporarily store sensitive healthcare and government data and provides the GPU capacity to train models securely and effectively.

For clinical insight, the core team had access to medical students diagnosing and providing treatments through the Jump Simulation Center that’s part of Carle Illinois College of Medicine. There, they tested InvoGenix’s ability to diary clinician and patient conversations and test the quality of AI-generated notes and diagnoses codes.

“We also learned through these conversations that many of the clinics we aim to support may not have the runway to comfortably commit to additional products with subscription models,” said Kavatekar. “This has lead us to consider developing alternative, flexible business models that enables us to service these practices in a sustainable way. 

With quantitative and qualitative data in hand, they began the process of validating their proof of concept.

“At first we thought that long wait times were due to scheduling too many patients, but we learned that the core problem was the slowdown of patient flow caused by the time doctors spent behind-the-scenes on compliance paperwork,” said Thaker. “ The Annals of Family Medicine reports that doctors spend more than half their day working on electronic health records. We discovered that InvoGenix could help save over 120 million annual hours on tasks they didn’t go to school to study, freeing up more time for patient care.”

The turning point: iVenture Accelerator

To move from proof of concept to prototype, the core team sought guidance and traction by tapping into the many Gies Business professors and programs that specialize in entrepreneurship.

As freshmen and sophomores , they applied to iVenture Accelerator, a program of the Origin Ventures Office of Entrepreneurship at Gies Business. iVenture Accelerator gives startups a space to scale within the University of Illinois System. It provides teams guidance on obtaining future customer feedback and developing a go-to-market strategy, resources to create a minimum viable product (MVP), mentorship and guidance from alumni, support from other students in the cohort, and connections to a pipeline of Illinois innovation hubs like mHUB and 1871.

iVenture is an intensive program that accelerates growth with a 10-week full-time summer sprint and 11 months of continuous entrepreneurial education throughout the academic year. The team benefited greatly from the two-semester iVenture Accelerator seminar series, which covers every aspect of entrepreneurship from feasibility analysis to commercialization.

“iVenture hammered home the concept of looking at our customer,” said Cerullo. “Engineers are taught to follow an applicable checklist to solve a problem, but that’s not how things work in the real world. iVenture’s collaborative class structure made me feel comfortable working beyond my own current skillset.”

The team pitched their idea based on InvoGenix’s potential measurable impact: Automating  clinical documentation and generating accurate medical billing codes to cut physician documentation time by up to 85%. iVenture awarded them $20K in non-dilutive funding, including $10K in capacity funding plus $2,500 stipends for four full-time team members.

"Getting your first yes is going to always be the hardest thing for any startup,” said Thaker. “Without that first, yes, you are a bunch of teenagers with a dream without supporters, right?" 

The InvoGenix journey demonstrates how Gies Business and the University of Illinois cultivate an entrepreneurial culture that moves students from an idea to industry impact.

“The iVenture Seminar greatly helped in reframing our product from simply delivering high-level machine learning systems to becoming something that has a practical entry point and interface to physicians,” said Kavatekar. “We learned how to translate theoretical research into a product that could create true impact.”

“InvoGenix is revolutionizing patient care by giving providers more time and reducing avoidable friction in clinical workflows — a compelling example of how thoughtful engineering and user-centered design can meaningfully improve healthcare delivery,” said iVenture Accelerator’s Edakara. “Their velocity, discipline, and technical maturity signal a venture with significant long-term potential.”

“As someone who has always aspired to become a physician-scientist, the opportunity to change the future of work in healthcare is both empowering and inspiring,” said Kim.

Marin added that the InvoGenix experience and Gies Business courses such as Financial Modeling (FIN 418) have taught her how to apply what she’s learned about money, cash flow, and net profit value to her path as an entrepreneur. She has since stepped back from the startup to focus on developing iOS consumer apps while taking advantage of a Gies Business semester abroad program at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship. The rest of the team of co-founders continue to build the product, work with clinicians, and refine the business model. They are focused on securing pilots with clinics and increasing model accuracy.

“Gies Business has been instrumental in creating an entrepreneurial environment that’s taught me how to think, how to act, and how to dream big in a radical and powerful way,” said Marin. “It was an honor to help build the foundation of InvoGenix alongside my cofounders and to be part of a team that continues to thrive.”