Why Hims & Hers turned to the autonomous vehicle industry to find an AI-savvy CTO

Hims & Hers, the telehealth and wellness company, has hired a veteran of the autonomous vehicle industry as its next chief technology officer. The move, according to Hims & Hers co-founder and CEO, Andrew Dudum, was intentional.

Hims & Hers on Thursday said its next CTO would be Mo Elshenawy, the former president and CTO of self-driving car company Cruise. Elshenawy left Cruise earlier this year after its parent company GM shut down the autonomous vehicle program.

The jump from AVs to health may seem unlikely, but Dudum told TechCrunch he purposefully turned to the autonomous driving sector to find a CTO who would help his company accelerate its AI-based product agenda.

“I was looking very much at leaders in the autonomous driving space, explicitly because you’re talking about leveraging technology and data and AI in an extremely high-sensitive environment where you have people’s lives at risk,” Dudum said in an interview.

Elshenawy, who holds more than 10 patents across AI, robotics and autonomous vehicles, told TechCrunch the move “is not as big of a leap as it might seem.”

“Self-driving cars use AI to make real-time decisions in complex, high-stakes and heavily regulated environments, where earning trust is everything,” he said in an email to TechCrunch. “Healthcare operates under the same conditions. You’re dealing with people’s lives, limited resources, and systems under stress. Translating AI into safe, reliable decision-making at scale applies directly to what we’re building at Hims & Hers.”

Hims & Hers is a San Francisco-based telehealth company that went public in 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. Founded in 2017, Hims & Hers initially focused on men’s health, selling erectile dysfunction medications and hair loss treatments. The following year, it expanded into women’s health and added “Hers” to its company nameplate. The direct-to-consumer company, which connects customers with licensed health care professionals, recently added mental health and weight loss treatments to its portfolio.

The company’s ambitions are reflected in its recent hires. Earlier this week, the company said former Amazon executive Nader Kabbani will be its next chief of operations.

Dudum sees AI as the technology that will help the company evolve and, ultimately, serve more people. Hims & Hers treats between 10,000 and 15,000 patients a day, according Dudum. The anonymized information of millions of patients — stats like clinical visits, the medications they’re prescribed, and if those drugs work — have been collected into a massive dataset. That data is now being used to create AI models that will eventually be employed to help diagnose and treat patients.

Two years ago, the company trained a model off its dataset to create MedMatch, a tool that helps doctors recommend mental health-related treatments. Dudum said all of its AI-based tools still have a human in the loop, specifically a doctor or other healthcare professionals.

“There’s a very strict and structured approach when it comes to clinical decision tools within the medical industry, so providers are ultimately, from a regulatory standpoint, still necessary to make all of these clinical judgments and decisions,” Dudum said. He noted that the company’s AI products are there to give insight and help make the providers more efficient and precise.

Dudum said the company’s AI also shows doctors and healthcare professionals how it arrived at its conclusions when making recommendations. “Showing the work and actually providing the kind of context behind the scenes as to what’s driving and what weights are driving the outputs, I think are actually, in many ways, just as valuable as the actual recommendation,” he said.