With the finale of the World Cup behind us, let’s take a moment to celebrate yesterday’s real winner.

A big round of applause to the Kalshi team for locking in a reported $40 billion in trading volume over the entire course of the World Cup.

This week we present the story of Haast Autonomous, the company building drones for time-critical medical deliveries. Enjoy!

Arek and Ethan 🦄

As a patient, the speed of your care in a hospital is heavily influenced by the delivery of critical lab materials, including diagnostic specimens, such as blood and tissue biopsies, clinical trial materials, and research samples for academic and pharmaceutical labs. Haast Autonomous is accelerating this delivery process by building autonomous drones that can frictionlessly integrate into the workflows of healthcare workers via a software platform that lets customers track and coordinate deliveries. It has a weatherproof design for all-season operation, temperature-controlled cargo, real-time tracking, integration with electronic medical records, among other features aiming to improve medical logistics.

Check it out: haastautonomous.com

Haast plans to charge labs and hospitals by the distance of their deliveries. It does not charge for hardware nor software.

As a premed student at Rice University, Ege Halac moved into a dorm right above the helipad at Houston's Texas Medical Center. Every day, he and his roommate, Jason Chen, heard the same rumble in the distance as helicopters ran nonstop, ferrying supplies, medical cargo, doctors, and patients. The two became fascinated by the logistics of healthcare delivery and improving it. 

To probe that instinct, they talked to hundreds of healthcare workers, charge nurses, doctors, lab technicians at that medical center, and others like it. Soon, the same story was being repeated: healthcare delivery was broken. When they realized that 99% of the lab professionals they spoke to stated that medical couriers negatively impact their work every week, they decided to take the leap and fix it themselves. Chen brought his aerospace background, Halac brought his healthcare experience, and they recruited Chen's freshman year roommate, Santiago Brent, an electrical engineer, to round out the team. 

Over 7 billion lab tests are run in the U.S. annually, with hospitals and independent labs handling 81% of that volume. The delivery of the materials needed for these tests, as well as the results of these tests, represents a $2.34 billion medical courier segment in North America, which is itself a slice of the $251.36 billion healthcare logistics market. 

All that movement currently depends on planes, hatchbacks, cargo vans, and refrigerated box trucks. Take, for example, the global healthcare company LabCorp, which flies its own private jets, but each flight involves ground couriers, a scheduled departure, and two rounds of loading. Similarly, vans run a fixed loop of a dozen or more sites and reach the lab only once the round is complete, bound to road networks, traffic, and a schedule built around collecting a full load. 

Autonomous drones, on the other hand, would fly from hospital to lab and back, with no intermediate stops, no traffic, and no driver, resulting in drastically reduced labor costs and much more frequent deliveries. This higher frequency pays off on both sides of the market. For hospitals, an earlier diagnosis moves the patient through and frees beds, adding effective capacity and increasing revenue. Meanwhile, the industry standard utilization rate of million-dollar analyzers in labs hovers around 75%-85%. Therefore, a steady stream of arrivals raises utilization of equipment already paid for, while maximizing the labor of lab technicians who operate them.

Haast's team seems to be building in the right direction to address this problem, but the real question is whether that lead holds once the market notices. Its defensibility rests on two moats: regulatory and distribution. The regulatory moat is Part 135, the federal certification from the FAA required for any commercial aircraft, which can take up to 24 months and substantial capital to secure. Meanwhile, the distribution moat means winning large hospital system contracts and embedding deeply into existing workflows, in order to make switching costs high, reflecting the playbooks of healthcare software incumbents such as Epic, which now handles more than 54% of the patient medical records of the U.S.

Haast’s team has a particularly compelling founder-market fit, since each of the co-founders' strengths addresses the expertise needed to solve the specific problem they're targeting. They've also explored the space in depth, having pivoted from an earlier focus on organ transplant delivery to lab delivery. Additionally, they have made progress fast, raising $1.85 million with an award-winning demo. In a strongly regulated market where the inefficiency is specific and well-defined, this team and their momentum are at the ready to build a national network and become a noteworthy player in healthcare logistics.