We started with a printout.
Claire Donnelly spent a summer trying to make sense of her mother's lab results across three patient portals and a stack of printouts. Ordinary people cannot read their own numbers. Northstar is the tool that finally explains them.
Your health numbers should not require a medical degree.
Every year, millions of people receive lab results full of numbers and abbreviations they cannot interpret. The reference range is printed right there, but “Hgb: 11.8 g/dL” means nothing without context. People squint, search online, and hope for the best.
The care team wants to help, but a ten-minute appointment cannot walk through every value in a recent panel. The gap between receiving results and understanding them is where most confusion lives, and it has been mostly unsupported.
Modern language models can read a lab panel and explain every value in plain, calm English with context: what the number means, whether it is in range, what gentle trend it fits into, and what might be worth discussing at the next visit. That is what we are building.
Product and language, in one room.
Claire Donnelly
Co-founder and CEO
Spent a summer trying to make sense of her mother's lab results across three patient portals and a stack of printouts, and realized ordinary people cannot read their own numbers. She built consumer products before Northstar and wanted the printouts to finally explain themselves.
Background: product and health navigationMarcus Lee
Co-founder and CTO
Spent a decade building natural language systems that read messy, human text, including clinical notes. He wanted to point that work at the lab panels and self-reported notes people keep about their own health.
Background: language AINorthstar is backed by North Loop Capital, with angel support from Dr. Helen Ostrander (internal medicine angel) and Ravi Malhotra. We are building full time on AI because we believe modern language models have made plain-English health-data explanation genuinely possible for the first time.
Four things we do not compromise.
The person first
Northstar exists to make one person's health picture a little clearer. Every decision starts there.
Stay in our lane
We explain. We organize. We surface what is worth a conversation. We never diagnose, never give treatment advice, and always point to a clinician for medical decisions.
Honest about AI
We say what the AI does, where it might be wrong, and what it cannot do. No hype. No black boxes.
Built to be trusted
People share their health data because they believe it will help them. We earn that trust carefully and protect it absolutely.
Build Northstar with us.
Whether you want to understand your own health numbers, join the team, or talk about what we are building, we would love to hear from you.