Driving Efficiency in Non-Emergency Medical Transport Industry - Bambi
Driving Efficiency in Non-Emergency Medical Transport Industry - Bambi
Our conversation with the Co-founder and CEO of Bambi - Nirav Chheda
💡 The Core of Bambi:
Co-Founder & CEO: Nirav Chheda (began his career at IBM and Electronic Arts and subsequently led several technology startups to success. Nirav holds a BA from Columbia University and an MBA from MIT Sloan)
Funding: $3.8M Venture Round in 2023
Funded in: 2022
Website: Bambi
Keywords: #Logistics #Transporation #Medical # Software #AI #Optimization
Bambi offers AI-optimized scheduling, routing, dispatching, and business management for US NEMT (Non-emergency medical transport) businesses.
Bambi’s platform taps into the experiences of NEMT owners, dispatchers, and drivers and thrives to tackle challenges in the NEMT industry one drive at a time.
Why the name “Bambi”? Bambi could stand for better ambulance intelligence. But the name Bambi, because it's short, it's cute, everyone's going to remember it.
🚩 Labor Shortage Meets Growing Potential User Base:
NEMT is a $10 billion industry.
Projected to more than double over the next ten years because the entire baby boomer generation is now getting into the age range where they need non-emergency medical transport services.
Supply is having a hard time catching up.
#1 Problem with the NEMT Industry - Labor Shortage:
Labor Shortage Impact:
There are 20,000 NEMT businesses across the country and growing rapidly. Nirav talked with at least a thousand of them. Almost everyone says hiring is one of the hardest problems they have.
Having a hard time finding qualified candidates.
Bambi's Solution:
Optimizes operations to maximize efficiency with fewer resources.
Optimization goal: assign the most number of trips to the fleet schedule.
A platform that tries to simplify and optimize across all key domains: staff scheduling, broker interactions, booking portal, merge passengers, generating invoices, signatures…
🎯 One Click - Run Bambi Run!
Nope, not this Bambi.
The company Bambi focuses religiously on user experience and redefined the definition of “Ease of Use” for the NEMT industry:
Serving a less tech-savvy customer base → focus on making the product extremely “easy.”
Ease of use!!! With just 1 button “Run Bambi Run”, the algorithm will run end to end, and generate the full, optimized schedule.
Rapid Adoption: A straightforward pricing model and intuitive software have contributed to a fast-growing user base, supported by strong referral networks.
You click that button, and in less than 60 seconds, Bambi runs its algorithms, its AI, and figures out how to assign all those 50 trips to the 7 vehicle schedules in the most optimal way so that the fleet is driving the minimum amount of distance, the most number of trips can be fit in, the most number of patients get a ride.
⏭️ Future - Building the “Uber/Lyft” of NEMT
The NEMT market is a two-sided market:
Supply-side: transportation companies
Bambi is expanding fast on the supply side
Demand-side: patients, hospitals, nursing homes…
“We're planning to build for the demand side to be able to order rides directly through the Bambi ecosystem.”
Start with the supply side, aggregate supply, and then you can go and turn on demand.
🤝 Activating the Power of the NEMT Community:
Social media influencers emerged in the NEMT industry: they put out educational videos on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
Bambi has been able to build relationships with pretty much all of these influencers in this space.
Nirav also started a podcast called NEMT Experts under the Bambi brand. “I interview people who are experts in the industry, people in all parts of the industry: people who focus on NEMT insurance, help NEMT hire drivers, NEMT consultants…