Andreas Cleve scrapped 80% of revenue: "I don't know how many times I've been told it can't be done"

Andreas Cleve, CEO of the Danish healthcare AI company Corti, has scrapped roughly 80 percent of the company's revenue as part of a strategic shift. The story comes from Bootstrapping Podcast, which spoke with him about three years ago, just after Corti closed a DKK 400 million Series B round.

At that time, Corti's vision was to be the AI assistant that doctors worked in themselves, an AI co-pilot for healthcare professionals. The company has since changed direction. Its ambition has moved one layer down the AI stack. Corti now wants to build the clinical AI infrastructure that thousands of other healthcare products can be built on, rather than selling the end-user assistant itself.

The shift raises a hard question for a European AI company: what do you do when the business you just raised DKK 400 million to scale sits in the layer of the value chain that you believe AI will hollow out? Corti's answer was to move away from that layer and give up most of its existing revenue in the process. The headline quotes Cleve as saying he doesn't know how many times he has been told it can't be done.

The available text is only the opening of the piece, so it does not describe how the transition was carried out, what the new infrastructure product looks like, or how the company is doing since the change.

The story matters as an example of a well-funded Nordic AI company deliberately abandoning most of its revenue to reposition itself in the AI stack, based on a bet about where value will end up as AI matures.