In a deeply regulated industry such as healthcare, building an AI-native app poses a host of unique challenges, particularly when it comes to navigating customer privacy and industry red tape. How do you create an industry-leading resource and stay on the cutting edge of tech, while managing these constraints?

Keoki Alexander-Chang can help you there. He's the founder and CEO of Minikai, a Melbourne-based startup using AI agents to slash the administrative burden on disability and aged care providers. Before launching Minikai, he led Deloitte's Forensic AI lab, so he's been thinking about applied AI in complex, regulated environments for far longer than most founders.

In this episode, Yaniv sits down with Keoki to explore what it really means to build a person-centred AI product in a high-stakes regulated sector — and how Minikai applies that same AI-native mindset to their internal operations, through fine-grained access control, human-in-the-loop design, and AI agents keeping the entire sales pipeline up to date in the background.

In this episode, you will:

Learn how to design agentic AI products for high-stakes regulated environments
Understand the importance of intentionally including fine-grained access control, provenance and adding friction to the process in order to keep humans in the loop
Make sense of the fundamental shift within the build vs. buy equation, and why Minikai is questioning every SaaS tool in their stack
Find out why Keoki treats his product like a garden, and why pruning is just as important as growing
Understand what "person-centred AI" actually means in the disability and aged care context
Hear how Minikai's team now uses continuously running AI agents to keep their entire HubSpot pipeline up to date
Learn about the story of the lapel mics: how Minikai is condensing the entire workflow from meeting to working code, skipping Jira entirely

Resources mentioned in this episode

Minikai (Keoki's startup: AI agents for disability and aged care providers): https://www.minikai.com/
Keoki Alexander-Chang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keokichang/
DJI Mic (the lapel mic Keoki's team uses to capture all meeting audio for Claude): https://www.dji.com/mic
Insiders React: How OpenClaw and Claude Cowork changed Gary Lo's approach to startups (the companion TSP episode referenced by Yaniv): https://www.tsp.show/insiders-react-how-openclaw-and-claude-cowork-changed-gary-los-approach-to-startups-w-gary-lo-op/

The Pact

Honor the Startup Podcast Pact! If you have listened to TSP and gotten value from it, please:

Follow, rate, and review us in your listening app

Subscribe to the TSP Mailing List to gain access to exclusive newsletter-only content and early access to information on upcoming episodes: https://thestartuppodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Secure your official TSP merchandise at https://shop.tsp.show/

Give us a public shout-out on LinkedIn or anywhere you have a social media following

Key links

This episode of the Startup Podcast is sponsored by .tech domains. Forget weird prefixes and creative misspellings; the availability for .tech domains is simply way better than .com. For a clean name that highlights your tech credentials, get a .tech domain at your favorite registrar.

Get your question in for our next Q&A episode: https://forms.gle/NZzgNWVLiFmwvFA2A