The Doctor Building the ICU Tech Stack: The Definitive Story of Dr. Dhruv Joshi & Cloud Physician
The complete profile of Dr. Dhruv Joshi, the Cleveland Clinic-trained founder of Cloud Physician, an AI-powered startup revolutionizing critical care.
In the world of high-stakes, venture-backed startups, founders often come from technology or business backgrounds, searching for a problem to solve. Dr. Dhruv Joshi’s story is the inverse. He is a deep domain expert, a highly trained critical care specialist, who lived a massive, systemic problem and was compelled to become a technologist and an entrepreneur to fix it. His venture, Cloud Physician, is not just another health-tech company; it is a bold, first-principles rethink of how we deliver life-saving expertise to the people who need it most, regardless of their location.
This article is a comprehensive dossier on Dr. Dhruv Joshi and the full-stack critical care company he is building.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From the Cleveland Clinic to the Front Lines of India
Dr. Dhruv Joshi's journey is one of evolution, not revolution. His career began with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) from the prestigious St. John's Medical College in Bengaluru, giving him a foundational understanding of the Indian medical system. Seeking to specialize, he moved to the United States, completing his Internal Medicine residency and eventually a prestigious fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
It was at this bastion of medical excellence that the seeds of Cloud Physician were sown. Alongside his future co-founder, Dr. Dileep Raman, he observed that even in one of the most advanced healthcare ecosystems in the world, technology integration into critical care was surprisingly lacking.
“It just seemed to us at that time that this is the way that health care delivery needs to evolve because the conventional forms are simply not cutting it. And if you were to sort of get into this and be at the forefront of leading some of this transformation, it would allow us the opportunity to move the middle needle significantly more than just taking up a conventional sort of position in the hospital.”
This observation prompted a reflection on their home country, where the problem was of an entirely different magnitude. As Dr. Joshi has noted, the United States has approximately 30 ICU beds for every one lakh patients; in India, that number is less than three. This ten-fold difference meant that the vast majority of ICU patients in India were not receiving the specialist care they desperately needed, leading to an increased number of preventable fatalities. This realization became their "calling," prompting them to leave their established careers in the US and return to India towards the end of 2015 with a mission.
The 18-Month Listening Tour
Upon returning to India, Dr. Joshi and Dr. Raman did not immediately start building a product. In a move that should be a case study for aspiring founders, they embarked on an intensive, 18-month immersive research tour. They traveled the length and breadth of the country, deliberately focusing on hospitals in tier-2 and tier-3 cities—the very places where the critical care gap was most acute.
“We spent a good year and a half just traveling to hospitals everywhere. So all the way from large hospitals in urban centers like Bangalore to tier two to tier three, North India, East India, West India. Just going there, talking to the doctors, talking to the nurses, seeing the hospital settings, just deeply understanding what the problem statement is a little bit more.”
This was not market research from a desk. It was a deep ethnographic study of clinical workflows, resource limitations, staff skill levels, and the economic pressures facing healthcare providers outside of major metropolitan areas. This foundational research ensured that the solution they would eventually build was not a transplant of a Western model, but purpose-built for the realities of Indian healthcare.
Deconstructing Cloud Physician: More Than a Software Company
Founded in Bengaluru in 2017, Cloud Physician is not merely a tele-ICU software provider. It is a
full-stack, AI-powered critical care delivery network that functions as a deep operational partner to hospitals.
Its business model is built on a "hub-and-spoke" architecture:
The Hub: A centralized, 24/7 "Care Center" in Bengaluru, staffed by a highly qualified team of intensivists, critical care nurses, pharmacologists, and dieticians.
The Spokes: Partner hospitals, predominantly in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, whose ICUs are technologically connected to the central hub via Cloud Physician's proprietary platform.
The model is designed to augment the bedside team, not replace them, helping to reduce burnout while upskilling local staff. This creates a powerful clinical and economic flywheel. By providing expert 24/7 oversight, Cloud Physician gives smaller hospitals the confidence to admit and retain more complex, high-acuity patients. This leads to a significant increase in the utilization of their high-value ICU beds—by up to
50%—which directly translates into a substantial increase in hospital revenue.
Concurrently, the rigorous, protocol-driven care delivered by the expert remote team leads to demonstrably better clinical outcomes, including a reduction in patient mortality by up to 40%.
RADAR: The AI-Powered Co-Pilot at the Core
The engine powering this entire model is
RADAR, the company's proprietary technology platform. Conceived as a "Smart ICU in a box," RADAR is an AI-powered co-pilot for clinicians, integrating several intelligent tools to automate tasks and deliver high-value insights.
“I would say that you know, when I went and saw a patient, I probably spend a majority of my time doing things that a machine could do better than me and less time on doing things that perhaps a machine could not do better than me.”
Its key components include:
NETRA: A state-of-the-art computer vision tool that addresses a critical challenge in Indian hospitals by automatically reading and digitizing data from disparate and often incompatible patient monitors. This is claimed to increase nursing efficiency by 30%.
AIRA: A machine learning-powered note-writing assistant that reduces the administrative burden on clinicians, cutting documentation time by 40%.
HERA: An automated document transcription tool to digitize legacy paper-based data.
SWARA: A voice-to-text dictation tool to further enhance efficiency.
This platform is built to be robust and function in often challenging environments, a direct result of the founders’ deep on-the-ground research. The company also holds patents for its proprietary methods, building a defensible technological moat.
“If you have an engineer who's building a solution for a multinational company who does not understand that ninety percent of the devices are not interoperable, he's not really gonna consider any solution other than a solution that knows.”
Growth, Scale, and Financials
Cloud Physician has demonstrated significant traction since its founding. The company’s progress is a testament to the clear value proposition for its hospital partners.
Total Funding: $14.5M+
Key Investors: Peak XV Partners, Elevar Equity, Panthera Peak
Key Funding Round: An $11M Pre-Series A round was completed in October 2021 and a Series A of $10.5M-$11M in June 2024.
Scale of Operations: 200+ hospitals across 23 states in India.
Beds Managed: Over 2,400 ICU beds.
Patients Cared For: Over 100,000 patients to date.
Revenue: The company's operating revenue grew to ₹22.3 Crore (approx. $2.69M) in the 2024 fiscal year, up from ₹13 Crore in FY23 and ₹8 Crore in FY22.
The Vision: A Global Engine for Critical Care
Dr. Joshi’s vision extends far beyond India. He is driven by a mission to democratize medical excellence and dismantle the barriers of geography and wealth that dictate healthcare quality.
“Our goal is to build this virtual hospital at a global scale. So we believe that this problem statement is not unique to India, but is one that is prevalent world over. And if we're going to address access to quality care for all, we'll have to move towards a model that allows for virtualization of care to take place.”
With fresh capital, the company plans to enhance the AI capabilities of the RADAR platform, accelerate growth within its target market of over 50,000 hospitals in India, and strategically expand into international markets, including the United States, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Dr. Joshi's journey from clinician to founder is a powerful example of how the deepest impact is often made by those who have lived the problem they set out to solve.
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