One of Medicine’s Oldest Signals Is Hiding More Than You Think, Mitchell Leshchiner

What we talked about.

Mitchell Leshchiner, cofounder of ElectroCare, joins Sunny Ray to explain why the electrocardiogram, one of medicine's oldest and most ubiquitous signals, may carry far more information than doctors have ever extracted from it. Leshchiner describes ElectroCare as a frontier foundation model for human physiology, built to predict and prevent the world's most common preventable deaths and diseases, starting with the ECG before expanding to other physiological signals. He traces the company's origins to personal health experiences in his own family, his time playing football professionally in France, and a fast timeline that took ElectroCare from a college project to a company backed by Mayo Clinic as a data partner and investor, alongside participation in Techstars and another accelerator in 2024. The conversation covers ElectroCare's two sides, a consumer subscription platform for high performance athletes tracking hydration and cardiac efficiency, and a clinical arm nearing FDA clearance for detecting conditions like heart failure and aortic stenosis from a standard ECG. Leshchiner also discusses how a podcast built the company's early distribution, growing a 35,000 person wait list, and what needs to be true before people trust AI reading their vital signs continuously.

ElectroCare's Mitchell Leshchiner explains how AI can unlock hidden chemistry and disease risk from a routine ECG.

The questions, and the answers.

What are you building at ElectroCare, and why should the world care?

We're building a frontier model for human physiology to predict and prevent most of the world's preventable deaths and disease. The way Anthropic and OpenAI transformed human knowledge, or DeepMind's AlphaFold transformed protein science, we want to do for physiological signals. Your body produces signals we can feed into this foundation model to say, for example, you're four years from heart failure, or you already have it undiagnosed.

You started ElectroCare while you were still finishing your degree. What made you decide the idea couldn't wait another year?

It was personal. Health is the most fundamental human need, and both my cofounder and I had family and personal health issues that showed us how broken the system really is. With any founder who has real potential, urgency matters most. The tech landscape moves fast, and if you can't move faster than others, you lose. Waiting another year wasn't feasible.

You played football professionally in France before going back to Illinois. What did being an athlete teach you about how performance data gets used?

Athletics is about optimization, not bare necessities, which pushes the frontier of what's possible. It taught me perseverance and grit, which matter in a regulated space. It also showed me that even at the elite level, most tools are broken and non science based, using the same inputs we've used for decades. That convinced me we had the technology to invent something genuinely new.

An accelerator and Techstars both took you in in 2024. What did those rooms change about the plan you walked in with?

Accelerators speedrun a lot of learnings and give you access to other companies as a benchmark for how fast people are moving and how they're organizing teams. Techstars isn't necessarily the most prestigious program, but a lot of unicorns came out of it, and it helped us figure out the right way to set up a business for success early, because that's usually where culture starts.

You and Josh met as students. What convinced you he was the right person to build a foundation model with?

There was technical scope and past experience that aligned with what we were capable of, and we'd both shown proficiency in that space. Beyond that, the mission was personal for both of us. Having two people at the table who are genuinely mission aligned is really what matters most in a cofounder relationship.

The team moved to Chattanooga in 2025. What did that buy you that staying put wouldn't have?

That was through a firm called Brickyard VC, who led our preseed. Their thesis was that before product market fit, before scaling, you want to be somewhere with no distractions so you can go heads down on product. In New York or San Francisco our burn would have been higher and we'd have been pulled into events and distractions. Chattanooga let us focus on building.

The thesis is that an ECG already carries chemistry nobody was reading. When did you first see that in the data and start to believe it?

That belief predated founding the company. ECG was interesting because it's cheap, ubiquitous, and we already take over 100 million ECGs a year in the US alone, nearly half a billion worldwide. For a hundred years it was used mainly for rhythm. Using modern AI techniques, we can go way beyond that, to mortality prediction, blood chemistry like potassium, or detecting undiagnosed heart failure.

Mayo Clinic sits on your site as a partner. What had to be true before a name like that would work with a 2024 company?

We don't work with Mayo on deployment, we work with them on data. They're an investor, and we have access to their data set, which we've used to build some of our frontier models. Once we proved the model in high performance and showed we could build a business with frontier results, that was enough, because the pace of innovation today is much faster than it used to be.