As Igor Couto talks about Sofya, the Miami-based startup he co-founded, he doesn’t sound like your typical healthtech founder. Instead, he sounds like someone chasing a moonshot: turning artificial intelligence into what he calls a “second brain” for doctors.
That vision has roots in São Paulo, where Couto spent more than two decades working in mission-critical tech. Eight years ago, he shifted into healthcare, building digital tools for Hospital Sírio-Libanês, one of Brazil’s top hospitals and the facility that treats the country’s president. At the same time, he was writing about deep tech and experimenting with early versions of AI models.
“We were one of the first users of GPT-2,” Couto told Refresh Miami. “I even published a book that was the first in the world to use the model to summarize chapters.”
By 2020, he saw what was coming: a wave of AI systems powerful enough to reshape medicine. Rather than sticking to incremental improvements like automated note-taking, Couto wanted to create AI capable of reasoning alongside physicians, surfacing evidence and personalizing treatment in real time. That’s when he founded Sofya – and soon after, moved to the US.
“The infrastructure gap, the talent gap, and the culture gap in Brazil made it hard to build something at this frontier,” he said. “Miami became the perfect place. It’s American in terms of resources and ambition, but with the passion and openness of Latin America. It’s the bridge that connects the Americas.”
Sofya’s product begins like many AI scribes: listening in on doctor-patient conversations and generating draft documentation. But that’s only the starting point. Behind the scenes, Sofya structures the data, encoding symptoms, lab results, and diagnoses into medical coding standards like ICD and LOINC. From there, the system cross-references guidelines and research to offer evidence-based suggestions to the physician – advice that can be followed or ignored.
“It’s invisible AI,” Couto explained. “Plug and play, working in real time with the physician.”
That ambition has started to attract serious partners. Sofya has already processed more than a million consultations in Latin America and participated in the Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate program. The company also secured a strategic seed round from MV Saúde, the Brazilian electronic health record giant with thousands of hospital clients.
Still, scaling in the US is a different challenge. In Latin America, Sofya charges per consultation. In the States, Couto expects to pivot toward value-based purchasing, striking revenue-sharing agreements with providers and insurers. “We’re still figuring it out,” he admitted. “But our first customer here is a South Florida clinic network, and that’s helping us learn fast.”
The long-term goal remains ambitious: algorithms that can detect patterns invisible to humans, such as analyzing hundreds of thousands of prostate cancer cases to identify subtle signals of disease progression.
“We want to reduce misdiagnosis and malpractice,” Couto said. “Our dream is to build a second medical brain – one that scales expertise to millions of patients.”
It’s a vision that, if realized, would reshape how healthcare is delivered. And Couto believes Miami is the place to do it. “Here, I feel welcomed,” he said. “It’s not just a gateway to Latin America. It’s a place where you can build something big.”
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