Impacting Psychiatric Diagnosis
with Brain-Analysis AI
Sang-yoon Bae, CEO, Risorius

How did your experience as a medical student engaging in academic research differ from actually founding and running a company?

I believed that quantifying brain health was a meaningful research topic that could benefit society and improve patient outcomes. In academia, having a technologically interesting idea may have been enough. In business, however, there are very different expectations. No matter how advanced the technology, customers demand cost reductions or the addressing of an immediate need in clinical practice. This realization led me to dive deep into why legacy industries operate the way they do. Instead of dismissing existing practices as outdated and assuming we could do things better, I approached the problem with humility and sought to understand the underlying issues. Only then was I able to identify genuine business opportunities that reflected real market demand.

You explored several business ideas before settling into your current direction. Looking back, what is your biggest regret?

I spent too much time superficially pursuing multiple ideas instead of committing myself to solving one problem in depth. Early on, I convinced myself that successful startups were supposed to launch quickly, iterate constantly, and pivot whenever necessary. In reflection, however, I think I went down alternate paths because I didn’t want to confront failure head on.
Today, AI makes it possible to build apps and services in a remarkably short time. Ironically, that can encourage founders to engage with the problems they are trying to solve on a more superficial level. Without a clearly defined problem and the determination to see it through, repeat experiments rarely produce useful outcomes. That is why we decided to discontinue our earlier ventures in InsurTech and wellness. Today, we are fully committed to one mission: developing new drugs for psychiatry and neurology and building a chain of psychiatric and neurological clinics.

Why did you choose to focus specifically on psychiatry and neurology? What is Risorius' business model and strategic direction?

Psychiatric and neurological disorders have traditionally been among the most difficult conditions to diagnose objectively. Clinical decisions have relied largely on patients' subjective descriptions and physicians' observations rather than quantitative data. At Risorius, we are transforming this inherently subjective field into a quantifiable one, ensuring precision through an AI-based brain foundation model2 for brain data analysis.
At the same time, we are developing a fully automated platform for hospital administration and clinical operations, enabling us to build psychiatric and neurological hospitals that are more affordable, faster, and higher in quality. We are currently conducting joint research with more than 15 institutions in Korea and overseas, including hospitals in Vietnam, the United States, and the United Kingdom, while continuing to build a robust body of clinically validated data.

• 2.An artificial intelligence model trained on large-scale datasets that can be adapted to perform a wide range of tasks, including language, image, and code generation.

What is Risorius currently focused on, and what is your long-term vision for the digital healthcare infrastructure you have in mind?

Our immediate priority is relocating our headquarters to the United States. This is a strategic decision that will allow us to overcome regulatory constraints in Korea— a place where companies face significant limitations in directly acquiring hospitals—and ultimately build autonomous hospital chains. Our long-term goal is to acquire struggling psychiatric hospitals and turn them around by deploying our AI-powered EEG analysis technology, automating and streamlining the work of physicians and nurses, and ultimately increasing patient conversion rates.
Our solution goes far beyond a data analytics tool. We envision it as an AI neuroscientist that seamlessly integrates clinical diagnosis with hospital operations. By leveraging objective brain data, we aim to significantly improve diagnostic accuracy while fully automating clinical workflows to reduce healthcare costs. Ultimately, we seek to transform the cost structure of healthcare delivery itself, providing the public with a better healthcare experience and, over the long term, better patient outcomes.