Founder Snapshot
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Founder: Natalie Curnes, Co-Founder & CEO
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Company: Autonomy Health
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Stage: Seed
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Founded: 2024
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Previous: Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), Morgan Stanley
Founder-Market Fit
“The days of physicians owning and operating their own practice is disappearing rapidly,” says Natalie Curnes. It’s a stark reality in American healthcare: consolidation is swallowing up independent doctors, shifting control to massive hospital systems and private equity groups. But Natalie isn’t just watching it happen - she’s building the operating system to stop it.
For Natalie, the mission to save private practice is personal. Growing up with parents who were private practice owners, she witnessed the unique bond between independent doctors and their patients. “I got to see that magic from a really young age of physicians owning and operating, having complete clinical and financial autonomy over what they do,” she recalls.
After starting her career at Morgan Stanley, Natalie spent seven years in healthcare investing, including a stint in private equity where she saw the other side of the coin. “That was kind of my first foray into seeing a lot of the bad that private equity brings into healthcare,” she admits. “They are financially motivated, not focused on ensuring patients get the best care possible.”
The Neurology Operating System
Autonomy Health isn’t just another point solution in a crowded market of healthcare tools. Natalie and her team are building a vertical operating system specifically for neurology - a specialty on the brink of massive transformation.
“Most neurologists want to grow but are limited by staffing and legacy tech stacks,” Natalie explains. The administrative burden is crushing. Simple tasks like prior authorizations can grind a practice to a halt because of disconnected workflows.
Instead of building isolated widgets, Autonomy Health is connecting these fragmented pieces into a unified whole. They started by reverse-engineering the process: selling the vision and building relationships before writing a line of code. This allowed them to understand the deep, second-order problems that generic software misses.
Hiring for Agency and the Zero-to-One Sprint
With a seed round raised and a product launch imminent, Autonomy Health is shifting gears into a critical building phase. Natalie is looking for engineers who aren’t just technically proficient, but who thrive in the chaos of early-stage creation.
“We want people with agency who take ownership over what they do and just run with things with very little context,” she emphasizes. In a small, fast-moving team, there’s no room for hand-holding. She values “zero to one experience” above all else - the ability to balance speed with scalability.
Interestingly, deep healthcare experience isn’t on the requirements list. “I can teach you healthcare all day long,” Natalie says. “I can’t tell you how to motivate yourself and take ownership.” She’s looking for builders who have seen what “great” looks like and are hungry to replicate it in a high-stakes environment. “We are in the office five days a week in a beautiful office in SoHo in NYC,” she adds. “We work hard, but we have fun too - we want people who value that sort of work environment”
Rewriting the History of Patient Care
The role of a Founding Engineer at Autonomy Health is about more than just automating faxes or scheduling appointments. It’s about laying the groundwork for a data revolution in a specialty that desperately needs it.
“We are starting with workflows but we want to end in a completely different place,” Natalie reveals. By becoming the system of record for independent neurology practices, Autonomy Health will eventually house the richest dataset on conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and MS in the country.
“With this data, you can start to do things that materially impact patient care,” she says. For Natalie, this is the ultimate goal: using software to not only keep independent doctors in business but to fundamentally improve how they treat complex diseases.
“If we can be a part of rewriting the history of how we treat these conditions in the US… that’s what we’re fighting for.”
Learn More
Autonomy Health is the intelligent operating system helping independent neurologists scale and deliver better patient care.
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Website: https://autonomyhealth.io
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Connect with Natalie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-curnes-92844597/
