Unity Stoakes sat down with Kimmi Grewal, Vice President of AI Ecosystem Partnerships at Microsoft, for a wide-ranging conversation on how health innovators can turn AI's potential into real products, partnerships, and scale. Grewal – who has served on the StartUp Health Impact Board since 2021 – shares why regulated industries like healthcare are adopting AI faster than expected, why the model itself is no longer the differentiator, and how programs like Microsoft for Startups and Pegasus can help founders access credits, enterprise customers, and go-to-market support.

This video is a portion of a live StartUp Health Fireside Chat. StartUp Health members get access to the full conversation, plus the ability to ask questions in real time during live sessions like this one.

🚀 Q1 alone saw more AI venture investment than all of 2025 combined
🌐 Open models are closing the gap with frontier labs on both performance and cost
🏥 Healthcare is proving to be a fast follower on AI adoption, not the laggard everyone expected
📊 The real differentiator isn't the model, it's proprietary data and owned workflows
⚖️ Speed matters, but scaling smartly means governance and safety can't be an afterthought
🔄 Why locking into a single AI model is a bigger risk than founders think
💰 How Microsoft for Startups and the Pegasus program offer credits and go-to-market support
🌍 A look at how AI adoption differs across the Bay Area, Europe, and Asia
🎯 Grewal’s take on why founders aren't as behind as they think they are