InvoGenix

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Gies College of Business

Industry: Health-tech

Founding Student Name(s): Sofia Marin, Alex Kim, Alex Cerullo, Krutang Thaker, & Ananya Kavatekar

Brief Description of Solution: InvoGenix is developing an AI-powered tool to reduce administrative and documentation burdens for physicians and healthcare providers. Physicians can cut documentation time by up to 85%, reducing burnout, speeding up billing, and preventing costly errors that drain the U.S. healthcare system of over $660M every. Specifically, the product does the following:

1. Automates clinical documentation – It helps turn physician-patient encounters / clinical notes into properly documented record.
2. Generates accurate medical billing codes (medical coding) from those notes. This is important because medical practices need correct codes for billing, insurance, compliance, etc.
3. Reduces physicians’ non-clinical work: By handling documentation and coding, the idea is to let providers spend more time on patient care rather than paperwork, reduceinge delays (such as in emergency rooms) by cutting down on administrative bottlenecks.
4.  AI driven: Their system uses AI to interpret standard physician-documented notes and perform the coding tasks.

Funding Dollars: 20K in non-dilutive funding from iVenture 

What led you to launch this venture? During my freshman year of college, I was at a research conference, presenting a poster about methamphetamine.

20 minutes later, I was sitting at a table with an ex-Google employee – who was part of a network dinner (that I may have only gone to because they were handing out free tacos).

The guy’s name was John Renaldi and he told me verbatim: “I have a billion-dollar business idea for you.” That same night, in my google drive, I created a folder called “health company idea” based on what he said. And as I wrote, researched, and talked with dozens of healthcare stakeholders, I realized that I think I found a problem.

There was only one issue. I had no tech–or even much business—experience.

In entrepreneurship, it’s not important to be knowledgeable; it’s important to figure things out, and then deploy the very vision and solution that was living in my brain.

I launched this as a project, and I never once called myself the CEO, or the co-founder.

I didn’t care about titles. I didn’t care about how “good” or “bad” it would look on my resume. I didn’t care about applying for internships, not when I had an idea of this magnitude.

I just cared about making an impact on medical billing – a system which is plagued by many flaws which affect both the practice and the patient.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? Our biggest accomplishment has been achieving a 30% relative improvement in micro-F2 scores for ICD-10 coding compared to baseline approaches in the industry, while simultaneously driving inference costs down to approximately $0.05 per transcript. This proves we can deliver both superior accuracy and economic viability—a combination that’s been elusive in this space.

I’m proud that we’re not just building technology; we’re creating a sustainable business model where every transcript processed has clear ROI for practices while maintaining healthy margins for growth.

How has your business-related major helped you further this startup venture? I loved everything but numbers, which is exactly why I majored in finance. I was not good at Excel, and I was worse at calculating…anything.

My passion will always be health, but I’ve intentionally designed my classes to be math/quantitative heavy so I could learn the fundamentals of business.

Now, you may ask, “Sofia, why would you do this?”

It didn’t matter if I knew a lot about the healthcare space if I also didn’t know about how I was going to generate cash, analyze a market, and understand the customer discovery process.

Hospitals and clinics are businesses at the end of the day, so it was important that I speak the same language.

Which business class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? My class on Financial Modeling, taught by Professor Kat Grimsley, has been most impactful. It was a class on real estate, IRR, Hurdle Rate, and all the other financial buzzwords that come with Excel. But it taught me about money, cash flow, and the golden rule of any investment: if NPV is greater than 0, you should invest!

In my own startup, I have to think about how we want our capital structure to evolve in the next 5 years, how we plan on allocating cash, and how we can best optimize future expected inflows. As any finance professor would say, money today is worth more than money tomorrow! Time value of money has been the most basic – yet also complex – financial fundamental that I think about when I evaluate the very hospitals and clinics we hope to have in our sales pipeline.

What business professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why?Professor James Noonan. He’s one of my current business professors who teaches BUS 301, and I just met him 4 weeks ago. After most classes, I’ll go up to him with one of my other good friends and we’ll talk. Most of the time, it’s about life, and about building generational character.

He’s already taught me lessons that I know will propel me at InvoGenix and every other startup I start.

I don’t care about making millions or billions of dollars.

I care about making an organic and authentic impact – and I’m learning that every day with Professor Noonan.

What founder or entrepreneur inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How did he or she prove motivational to you? My dad (Roberto Marin, to the rest of the world). He was the only one in my family starting his own business. He wouldn’t talk about his work, but I remember him saying something along the lines of the following: “When I first started out, it was torture. I would never wish that upon anyone.” Those lines should’ve scared me, but I think it fueled me. He created his own rebellion, broke the odds, and channeled the love he was raised in – from the South Side of Chicago – to impact hundreds of people. He helps people with life insurance and money. That’s not what I want to do, but I want to be able to impact the way he does. His deliverables don’t go to a never-ending ladder of bosses and executives in a perfectly designed corporate building. He’s designed a bubble to impact and change people’s lives. My dad inspires me every day. He’s much more than my dad. He’s my mentor, companion and best friend.

What is your long-term goal with your startup?

Five years from now, I envision InvoGenix being a matured startup, with over 50 clinic and hospital partnerships. It will have deployed our software across small and growing systems pipelines

My goal is for InvoGenix to be bigger than five members. It is to create something that is beyond us, that can generate generations of impact, especially for individuals still at the margins of discrimination and unfairness.

I want to launch InvoGenix globally. Right now, it’s within a powerful University of Illinois ecosystem (named iVenture), which I have grown so fond. But why should InvoGenix stop at the edges of the university’s cornfields? Why can’t it expand into the very rural communities which are still plagued with inequities and lack of healthcare access?

Health isn’t supposed to be a privilege, but it is in the U.S.

Medical bills have destroyed the narratives of entire families.

InvoGenix is not a company I want to be known for helping optimize hospitals finances. At the core, InvoGenix is about helping patients. It’s about bringing patients back into the healthcare narrative and fixing a large dent in the healthcare system – one bill at a time.  

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? I view InvoGenix as a puzzle. When it was an idea, I had a vague idea what the final picture was going to look like. Only delusion allowed me to think I could break into a field like healthcare.

Before I even got to the University of Illinois, I was given an award called STAMPS, a full-ride scholarship given to 10 students every year who immersed themselves in community impact. Kristine McKoskey, Director of STAMPS, was the first person here who saw how big my dreams were, and she’s one of the biggest reasons I started InvoGenix in the first place.

The University of Illinois is like a mini San Francisco, with ideas, and people who have been inspiring to me.

Up to this point, I owe all the credit to those around me. To my friends, like Maricela Uribe & Andrea Gaitan, who always gave me a reason to laugh. To my mom, who fueled me with inquisition and passion around health. To Manu Edakara, Director of the iVenture program, and Mayank Mehta and John Rimando: they have all drastically paved the entrepreneurial ecosystem at the University of Illinois, and who have made more intros for me than I can count. To Ishan Deshpande, who created buildIllinois, the very first entrepreneurial space I got involved with. To Austin Kennedy, who gave me a powerful glimpse of the entrepreneurial world and who helped create a mini-SF inside the university. To Stephanie Faraci, Kearsa Rawson, and Jed Taylor who took me and four other Gies students to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship workshop last winter to meet over 20 established entrepreneurs.

I’m confident when I say InvoGenix is much bigger than the five of us. It is composed of a whole bunch of puzzle pieces. But unlike a puzzle, it changes and grows daily.

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