Melvin Chen didn’t set out to build an AI company. He was semi-retired, fresh off an IPO, contemplating a life of tennis tournaments and investing. But within a couple of years, he was elbows-deep in Australian GP practices, diagnosing an invisible illness in the system: paperwork. Mountains of it.
Today, he’s the founder and CEO of Care GP, a startup on a mission to 10x the productivity of healthcare provider admin and ops teams through AI. Their first product, Samantha, isn’t just a tool. She’s an AI agent that clinics literally dance about. No, really. One customer sent them a music video.
The $1.3 trillion problem
Before founding Care GP, Melvin had spent years navigating healthtech from multiple angles: investor, operator, and commercial lead. He’d seen it all: the promise of AI, the hype cycles, the friction of clinical tools that never got used. But one stat stuck with him: a third of the US healthcare system’s $4 trillion spend goes to administration.
"It was a $1.3 trillion problem hiding in plain sight," Melvin explains. "And nobody was solving it well."
After moving to Australia in 2024, Melvin went deep. He spoke with over 150 healthcare providers across specialties. The insight? GP clinics were drowning in documents. Referrals, pathology results, specialist letters; all of it processed manually by receptionists at $40/hour. That time wasn’t just expensive. It was better spent helping patients and clinicians.
He saw an opportunity to build something foundational. Something invisible, but game-changing. "Everyone wants to fix clinical care. But if we don’t fix the admin layer, we’re just bottlenecking progress."
Enter Samantha
Rather than chase the overcrowded scribe market or patient-facing chatbots, Melvin went for the admin layer, an area ripe for automation and impact. He and his team built Samantha: the Smart Medical Document Allocations Agent. Her job? Read, extract, and file clinical documents into a clinic's practice management software.
The result: a 10x improvement in speed and accuracy.
Since launching out of beta in May 2025, usage of Samantha has grown 175% month-on-month for the last 5 months. It turns out almost every clinic faces the same problem, and word of mouth is spreading fast.
"We knew the problem was everywhere, but seeing it validated in clinic after clinic has been incredible. Samantha’s not just saving time, she’s creating joy."
Dancing customers and inbound demand
One clinic loved Samantha so much that they posted a video of their team dancing as she processed documents. That moment was a turning point.
"It wasn’t just utility," Melvin says. "It was product love. That’s when we knew we were onto something."
Care GP now supports over 150 clinics and is gearing up for rapid expansion. Their six-month goal? Become the AI admin leader in primary care across Australia, scaling to 2,000 clinics. After that, they're eyeing other healthcare segments: dental, radiology, and pathology, before heading to the US.
The growth has been largely organic. With minimal outbound sales, demand continues to flow in. It’s the kind of momentum most startups dream of.
Building an army of agents
Samantha is just the beginning. The team is already beta-testing Veronica (for voice appointments) and designing others like Bill (for billing) and a potential AI-enabled CRM for patient outreach, marketing and communications. The endgame? A full-stack OS of AI agents that enable what Melvin calls "Superintelligent healthcare providers."
Each agent tackles a specific pain point in the clinic’s workflow, from front desk to back office. Together, they form a modular, intelligent backbone for the modern healthcare system.
"We’re not building toys. We’re building infrastructure. The boring-but-critical stuff that changes everything."
Melvin envisions a future where admin and operations is no longer a bottleneck, but a superpower, streamlined, data-rich, and fully integrated into patient care.
Advice from the operator-investor-operator
Melvin's path wasn’t linear, and he’s the first to admit his early startup was riddled with rookie mistakes. His advice for first-time founders? Don’t start one right away.
"Join an early-stage startup. Learn what great looks like. Understand how to talk to customers. That’s the fastest way to build the muscle."
It’s advice he followed himself. Before launching Care GP, he embedded himself in a couple of healthtech startups, learning what worked (and what didn’t). That experience shaped everything, from product to team to go-to-market.
What got him into the Startmate Accelerator wasn’t just vision. It was traction. "We built something people wanted. That’s what matters."
Even if you don’t have traction yet, Melvin says, being embedded with customers is key. "Work with them. Be in their world. Build with them. That’s how you create something real."
Join the rocketship
Care GP is now hiring ambitious engineers, operators and customer obsessives. If you care about healthcare and want to help build a generational company from the ground up, reach out at caregp.com.au. Customers, partners, and investors also welcome.
Melvin's not on the tennis court anymore. He’s building the future of healthcare, one AI agent at a time.
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