ThriveLink’s founder says St. Louis is the place to be for a health care startup

Kwamane Liddell is not a typical St. Louis boomerang.

A Chicago native, he says his ties to the region took root a little later in life while studying for a master’s degree in health administration (and later law degree) at Saint Louis University. His career took him to the West Coast, though, before a 2022 Arch Grant award brought him and the company he founded to St. Louis for good.

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“We were in California at the time,” he says. “This was the place that had the most resources, access to information, just really that community that could help us individually develop as an organization.”

Liddell is the CEO of ThriveLink, which builds “telephonic agents” powered by artificial intelligence for hospitals, health insurance companies, and governments. They can help process applications for a range of assistance programs, such as with food, utilities, housing, transportation, and others.

“They talk to people over the phone, and that’s important because so many families don’t have internet, or they have trouble reading,” he says. “Essentially we take all of those government applications, or health insurance programs, and we train agents that can talk to people over the phone and allow them to complete the applications.”

The company was previously known as Nutrible. Founded in 2022, it sought to address needs he became acutely aware of working as an emergency department nurse, where he would regularly see patients who clearly needed some type of assistance, be it with housing, utilities, food, or something else, but struggled to navigate government bureaucracies.

Liddell remembers a patient he treated had particularly high blood pressure, and he filled out paperwork to get her enrolled in a program that could help with that condition. But she wound up failing to complete the enrollment because program administrators wanted more information.

The next time he saw her was after she had suffered a stroke.

“I know if she had gotten into that program, maybe she still [would have] had a stroke, but her blood purse would have been a lot lower, we would have had a much better chance at preventing that outcome,” he says.

Such difficulty accessing benefits is unfortunately common, Liddell says, especially for people at the lower end of the income spectrum, who may not have easy access to the internet, but can more easily make a phone call.

“What happens in every hospital is there are so many people who need the most assistance, [but] they never make it to that community organization or that appointment I set up,” he explains. “They really need support in real time.”

He adds it’s especially critical for people just working to make ends meet who end up needing assistance because they got sick, couldn’t work, and fell behind on their bills. In other cases, hospitals won’t discharge patients if their utilities have been disconnected, like a patient he knew of who used an oxygen machine.

“Historically, if you needed assistance, you either had to find someone in your family that can help you, or you might have to go to a food pantry [or other location], where there are social workers that can help you,” he says.

Using a combination of people and AI agents that can help satisfy bureaucratic demands, ThriveLink steps in to facilitate such conversations and get assistance applications moving, Liddell says. Its efforts helped families get $3 million in resources last year.

Liddell explains the system is designed to contact people once they’ve been discharged to begin a conversation to get assistance set up, but he adds social workers and nurses have found ways to get the process moving faster.

“They have flyers that they give patients, and we’re seeing where patients are getting their lights turned on before they get home, because the AI agent can talk and just start the process while they’re laying in the hospital bed,” he says.

It’s a service that Medicaid plans, hospital systems, and government agencies have found valuable, as they hire ThriveLink to manage the paperwork required to connect patients with the different kinds of support they may need, Liddell explains. He’s clear that ThriveLink is not meant to eliminate jobs, but rather allow already constrained organizations provide better service to their patients, by helping to work through backlogs of people who need to submit paperwork for certain assistance programs.

Liddell adds ThriveLink is priced in such a way that the service costs 60 and 80 percent less than it would to hire a full-time staff member to manage the same thing. For small clinics, this can mean a subscription cost as low as $1,000 a month, while larger enterprises may pay upwards of $200,000 or $300,000 a year.

“We priced our product in such a way—and AI allows us to do that, just new technology—that organizations who have a hard time budgeting for more staff and more innovations can afford it,” he says.

Looking forward, he says ThriveLink has 40 employees, is turning a profit, and operating in 17 states. Liddell says that initial success affords him choices: raising capital to scale up faster, or continuing to refine its core product. That’s all still an open question, Liddell says.

One thing that isn’t, to his mind, is St. Louis, which he sees as essential to the company’s success. He points to the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and organizations such as Arch Grants, UMSL’s accelerator, and Cortex, as well as the region’s academic prowess and the large health systems operating here.

“I don’t know that we could have accomplished what we did—not as quickly, at least—without being a part of it,” Liddell says. “I encourage other people to grow companies in St. Louis. I’m like, Put me on a commercial, I’ll tell y’all about it.”