Meet the Aster Team: Building AI That Puts Clinicians First

When Aster joined Elation earlier this year, we didn't just gain a talented team — we welcomed people who share our deepest conviction: that technology should serve clinicians, not the other way around. Aster built an AI-native EHR for women's health with that principle at its core, and now, together, we're bringing that same vision to primary care at scale.

We sat down with Dr. Lailah Kara-Newton (Co-founder, Chief Medical Officer), Fifi Kara (Co-founder, Chief Product Officer), and Nacho Vazquez (Chief Technology Officer) to talk about why they started Aster, what they learned building in healthcare, and what excites them most about this next chapter.

For people meeting Aster for the first time, what is the human story behind why you started building in this space?

Lailah: We started building Aster after my own experience of the healthcare system during my pregnancy. Despite being a physician, I experienced preventable complications because multiple things fell through the cracks. Fifi and I then started asking the hard questions: what would it take to fix the infrastructure underneath the system?

Fifi: I had experience building software for health and fitness devices. I understood technology. I understood product. And I kept coming back to the same question: if we can build tools this sophisticated for consumer health, why are the tools inside the clinical system still letting people down? We started building Aster because we'd seen up close what was at stake when the infrastructure underneath care doesn't hold. That's always been the north star: make delivering care more enjoyable, more manageable, and ultimately safer—for the families on the receiving end, and the clinicians giving everything to serve them.

Was there a specific moment or experience that made you feel the status quo in medicine needed to change?

Lailah: When I started my OB/GYN residency, I was walking into rooms carrying my own experience as a patient—and started to notice why delivering good quality care felt so difficult. Clunky workflows, fragmented information, documentation that pulled my attention away from the person in front of me. I could see exactly where the cracks were, because I had fallen through them myself. That's when it crystallized for Fifi and me—if we were going to help fix the system, we had to start with the clinician experience. Because when clinicians are fighting their tools, patients pay the price.

What did building Aster teach you about what clinicians actually need from technology day to day?

Fifi: Building Aster—our women's health EHR—and then Atlas, our front-office voice agent, taught us that clinicians need fewer decisions and less cognitive burden. Every unnecessary click, every field that doesn't map to how they actually think, every moment they spend navigating software instead of their patient—that isn't a UX problem, it's a care problem. What clinicians need from technology day to day is radical simplicity in service of complex work. Tools that feel like they were built by someone who has actually been in the room. We learned that clinicians are extraordinarily good at adapting to broken systems because they have to be. The real work was helping them imagine something better, and then building that.

Nacho: Our mission was always to remove as much burden as possible from clinicians—anything that wasn't patient care. That's a good north star, but it only works if it's grounded in reality: in understanding what's actually in the way, even when the honest answer is that our own tools are the thing in the way. Building Aster taught me that the biggest enemy of good clinical technology is bad assumptions baked in at the data model level—decisions made far from the exam room that quietly shape everything a clinician fights with later. Day to day, clinicians don't need technology that makes decisions for them; they need it to absorb the tasks that drain them, so they can bring their full attention to the person in front of them. It's a subtle distinction, but a critical one—and it took building, shipping, and watching real clinicians use our product to truly understand it.

What made Elation feel like the right next chapter for your team?

Fifi: Honestly, it came down to one thing: they never stopped believing in putting the clinician first. In a space full of companies chasing efficiency metrics and consolidation plays, Elation built something clinicians actually trust—and they did it by staying stubbornly close to the people they serve. That's not easy to maintain at scale. The fact that they did told us everything we needed to know about how they make decisions. When we looked at what they'd built and why, we saw our own values reflected back at us. The other thing that mattered deeply was Kyna's vision for what primary care could look like with the right technology underneath it. Women's health and primary care are not separate conversations; they're the same conversation about meeting people where they are, knowing them fully, and walking with them through every chapter of their health. Elation understood that. There was no convincing needed. It felt less like an acquisition and more like finding the team we were always supposed to be building with.

Nacho: Aster was my first time in healthcare, and it was personal—my daughter had just been born, and I'd seen how much families entrust to their clinicians. Those years taught me that healthcare is where I can make the most impact as a software builder; it's one of the few places where good engineering shows up in someone's hardest moments. Elation felt like the right next chapter because it shares that same passion, and the same principles about how healthcare software should be built—that it should earn clinicians' trust, get out of their way, and respect the weight of what they do. And because Elation is in primary care, it's a chance to serve every kind of physician and patient at a scale that carries real responsibility—and real impact.

From your perspective, where is the strongest overlap between what Aster cared about and what Elation is building?

Nacho: A lot of what's shipping in this space right now demos beautifully and falls apart in practice. What Aster cared about—and what I see in Elation—is a more disciplined question: what does technology actually need to do to make this clinician's day better and this patient's outcome safer? That's the overlap that matters most to me. Both teams start from the clinician and the patient, not from the technology, and let that determine what's worth building rather than chasing what's impressive in a demo. We share a belief that the real opportunity isn't in any single feature, but in treating the friction clinicians face—scheduling, intake, documentation, the administrative weight of a day—as one connected problem rather than a dozen separate ones. AI has a real role to play there, and I think we're only at the very beginning of what's possible. What excites me about Elation is that it's approaching that future with the same intent Aster had: build technology that earns its place in the room, and that by the time a clinician walks in, has quietly taken care of the things that were never the point of their work. That's exactly the work I want to be part of.

In practical terms, how will clinicians benefit from Aster and Elation joining forces?

Lailah: Elation was built on a belief we share deeply: that the physician-patient relationship is sacred, and technology should protect it, not erode it. What that looks like in practice is tools that remove the friction between a clinician and their patient. Elation has spent years earning the trust of clinicians by staying true to that. What Aster brings is a layer on top of that foundation—specialty-specific workflows and AI that actually understands the clinical encounter. That alignment goes beyond mission; it shows up in how both teams think about building. We're not interested in AI that automates for the sake of it. We're interested in AI that superpowers the clinician, that handles the administrative weight so they can bring their full attention to the patient in front of them. That's the opportunity when these two teams come together.

What problem were you solving with AI at Aster, and how does joining Elation help you solve it at scale?

Fifi: Clinicians were spending more time managing their tools than caring for their patients. Every hour lost to documentation, intake, and administrative busywork is an hour taken from the relationship that actually drives outcomes. We built Aster as an AI-native EHR not as a feature, but as a founding principle. Joining Elation means we can continue building at a scale we couldn't reach alone. Elation gives us the infrastructure, the trust, and the clinical breadth to take everything we learned and apply it across primary care. Which is not a small thing—it's the real-world difference between proving an idea and actually changing the system.

What are you most excited to help build or influence next at Elation?

Lailah: What I'm most excited about is helping Elation stay deeply connected to the clinician voice as we push into the next era of AI-powered care. Through clinical advocacy, I'm making sure that as we build, we have a direct line to the people we're building for—and that can only make what we ship better.

Nacho: For me, it's the agentic infrastructure—building the layer that sits underneath the clinical workflow and quietly handles everything that doesn't need a clinician's attention, so that the ones that do get their full presence. We laid the groundwork at Aster. Elation is where we get to build it properly, at the scale where it actually moves the needle for the people who need it most.

Fifi: What excites me most is the opportunity to show what a truly clinician-first AI platform looks like at scale—one that doesn't just automate tasks but genuinely knows the clinician using it, anticipates what they need, and gets smarter over time. We experienced that at Aster, and now at Elation, we get to build the full picture alongside a team that has spent years earning clinical trust. We're excited to be here and looking forward to what we get to build together!

Ready to experience clinician-first technology?

The future of primary care is being built by people who understand what it takes to deliver great care—because they've been in the room. If you're ready to see what happens when AI serves clinicians instead of the other way around, we'd love to show you.

Schedule a demo to see Elation in action.