There is a particular kind of insight that only comes from crossing over. Gerald (Jerry) Wilmink, PhD, has been the scrappy founder building something from nothing. He has been the Chief Business Officer shepherding an AI platform to scale. And now he is the person on the other side of the table at one of the most storied health systems in the world.

As Director of Business Development and Licensing at Cleveland Clinic Innovations, Wilmink helps inventors, researchers, and early-stage companies find the fastest route from idea to patient impact. He joined StartUp Health co-founder Unity Stoakes for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of health tech, the evolving role of AI, and what it really takes to build something that lasts.

Wilmink's career began not in a boardroom or a pitch competition but in a closet-turned-research-lab at an Air Force Research facility in San Antonio, where he was tasked with building an advanced biosensing operation from scratch. "Building that lab was like building a startup," he said. "I had to recruit the people, get the tools, publish the work. It was a baby startup before I knew what a startup was."

That foundation informed everything that came next, including WiseWear, a wearable biosensing company he founded after his grandfather died from a fall, and eventually CarePredict, a StartUp Health portfolio company where he served as CBO and helped build one of the early AI platforms designed to predict health risk in seniors before it became a crisis.

When he returned to Cleveland and joined Cleveland Clinic Innovations, he brought all of it with him.

Cleveland Clinic Innovations has been operating for roughly 25 years, and its approach has evolved considerably. The office now manages everything from licensing agreements with major companies to co-development partnerships with seed-stage startups, and in some cases spins out its own ventures. A 50,000-square-foot innovation center houses companies working hand-in-glove with Cleveland Clinic physicians and researchers.

What Wilmink has found most effective is not the old model of building everything in-house. "Finding early-stage startups that are strategically aligned with assets and researchers we already have, we can bring our strengths to the table, they bring theirs, and we get to a solution faster," he said.

A recent example: an augmented reality rehab platform for Parkinson's patients, developed by Cleveland Clinic researcher Dr. Jay Alberts, was licensed to UK-based company Stroll. The technology allows patients to navigate a holographic environment, stepping over virtual obstacles while clinicians track real-time improvements in gait and balance. Rather than build a standalone company from scratch, the innovation was accelerated by pairing it with a team already operating in that space.

Wilmink has watched AI evolve from a buzzword to a genuine clinical tool over the course of his career. In its earliest form, the work was about building neural networks to predict fall risk in seniors. At CarePredict, it expanded into deep learning models that could flag behavioral changes signaling depression or urinary tract infections. Now, inside Cleveland Clinic, the applications span everything from ambient AI scribing reducing documentation burden on physicians to predictive algorithms being evaluated for FDA pathways.

"Physicians are more open to these tools now," he said. "There's still limitations, but I think we're in an acceleration phase. The next 10 years is going to move fast."

Unity Stoakes noted something he has observed across the StartUp Health portfolio: the majority of early AI in healthcare was concentrated on the administrative layer, fixing billing, scheduling, and documentation. That work matters. But what is increasingly exciting is a second wave now emerging on the clinical side, where AI is contributing to diagnostics, discovery, and care delivery in ways that were not plausible just a few years ago.

Wilmink sees the same convergence. Better sensors, consumer-grade wearables that now rival former clinical-grade tools, and AI models that can make sense of continuous data streams are combining in ways that give clinicians entirely new inputs. "Having the tools and systems to allow physicians to perform at their best," he said, "is one of our major aims."

For founders navigating this landscape, Wilmink's counsel is direct: reach out early, and do not try to build everything alone. "Come in early, get feedback right from us, from the physicians," he said. "Many times a startup wants to try to build all the tools themselves and not go to these large organizations that know what the problems are."

His second piece of advice: go to StartUp Health. He means it. Having watched what the community did for his own journey as a founder, he said it without hesitation. "Connecting with the right people, having others around you who are a couple years ahead of you or behind you, that's critical when you're out there getting started."