Virgo
Virgo is the leading cloud video capture, management, and AI analysis platform for endoscopic medical procedures. Since launching in 2018, we've helped physicians from leading medical centers including The Mayo Clinic, Northwestern, and Mass General capture over 300,000 procedure videos — the largest data set of its kind.
Our platform consists of a small device — similar in form factor to an AppleTV — that connects to any existing endoscopy system. The Virgo capture device automatically and securely captures procedure videos and transfers them to our HIPAA compliant cloud storage and web portal.
We're currently expanding the Virgo platform to include tools that automatically identify patients who are good candidates for clinical trials — starting with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). These tools incorporate AI analysis of procedure videos, coupled with information from the clinical medical record. The typical IBD trial site recruits only 1 patient per year. Virgo is working with leading pharma companies to accelerate trial site recruitment to 2 patients per month, which will help get new treatments to market faster and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue for pharma companies.
Long-term, we are building the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset of endoscopy videos and will continue to leverage this dataset for new AI applications. One such example is in the space of real-time polyp detection for colorectal cancer screening (see case study with Google's Coral EdgeTPU system: https://coral.ai/news/virgo-svs).
Why join us?
We have the largest, most diverse, and fastest growing video data set in endoscopy. Currently over 300,000 procedure videos and growing over 40,000 new procedures per quarter. These videos come from some of the top medical centers in the country.
We are currently generating revenue both from hospitals ($250K this year) and pharma companies ($750K this year). We are working with three of the leading pharma companies in the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) space.
In a highly regulated industry (healthcare) we've focused on rapidly bringing products to market that don't require FDA clearance, yet still have a high impact. On our roadmap, we will be developing automated video analysis tools and a platform to match patients with eligible clinical trials based on their procedure video.
Engineering at Virgo
Virgo's engineering team is currently small (but growing!) with our CTO and one software engineer. Our CEO is also fairly technical and will jump in to contribute from time to time, particularly around machine learning problems. We try to run as close to 2 week sprints as possible, though occasionally there's some flexibility depending on the problems at hand. While our team is small, our stack is large — with elements of hardware, embedded software, video streaming, cloud storage/computing, and a user-friendly web interface for our users.
Since the start of the pandemic, we've gone fully remote. We're still active on Slack during the day and have engineering team standup M/T/Th, with full Virgo team standup W/F.
We stream a very large (and soon to be massive) amount of video data constantly. This video needs to be properly ingested and then muxed into the appropriate clips. All in a secure, HIPAA compliant fashion. We are also actively building out integrations to other Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems to pull in additional clinical data.
Our product pipeline includes interesting challenges around machine learning for automated video analysis and building out a new version of our web portal to support clinical trial recruitment.
You would work on the embedded software for our next version of the Virgo video capture device. The current capture device is powered by a Raspberry Pi + an H.264 video encoder board that streams encoded video to the RPi via ethernet. While this setup works well, it is cumbersome to install and prone to user setup issues.
The next version of the Virgo video capture device will be based on the Intel NUC platform with an integrated HDMI or SDI capture card. This new device will eliminate the need for an extra board and most video converters, greatly simplifying setup. It will also give us a lot more on-device processing power and ability to expand in the future with AI accelerator boards such as the Coral EdgeTPU.
With this new device, you would also work on improving our streaming protocol to improve efficiency, reduce dropped video data, enable bi-directional device communication, and more.
You would work on building out our new web portal to support clinical trial recruitment. We've built wireframes for dashboard pages that will show the user (either a principal investigator or clinical research coordinator) which patients from their health system are likely candidates for given trials. This new portal will need to support charts and an integrated video player.
We need to build scalable AI pipelines for our video analysis. Currently, we run a few video analysis processes in a somewhat haphazard way. Going forward as we role out new and potentially more compute intensive AI inference models, we need to streamline these processes.
Working at Virgo
We're a hard working bunch, yet flexible when needed to respect the importance of personal time. We're very open about our successes and the challenges facing the company, highlighted by a bi-weekly strategy meeting. More than anything, we really care about improving healthcare. All new employees go through an 8 week Colon Class to learn about anatomy, pathology, procedures, and health technology!
-
Generous Vacation
unlimited vacation (suggested at least 14 days)
-
Travel
We're happy to get engineers onsite with customers to help out on installations and just get a better sense of our users. Observing procedures is fascinating and very rewarding (currently on hold due to COVID-19, but we hope to resume in the future).
-
Workshops/Conferences
In the past, we've sent engineers to Google Cloud Next and GlueCon
-
Flexible Hours
We shoot for hours of at least 9:30am to 5pm, but we're flexible when things pop up. More than anything we care about productivity. Our CEO, Matt likes to burn the candle at both ends and will gladly hang at the office with engineers for moral support and problem solving as long as you want :)
-
Health Insurance
We provide full medical, dental, and vision; plus a One Medical subscription
-
Company Retreats
Once we're able to safely travel, we intend to resume twice yearly company retreats
-
Gym/Fitness
We offer $30/mo gym stipend
-
Work from Home
Prior to the pandemic, we were operating successfully as a distributed team (3 in SF, 2 in Chicago, 1 in NYC) with small shared office spaces in each. Since the pandemic, we've moved to a fully remote & work from home model. Geographically we are now 2 in SoCal, 1 in Minneapolis, 2 in Chicago, and 1 in NYC. Our foreseeable future is fully WFH, though we may look to setup small regional offices again at some point down the line.
-
Other
We provide all engineers with a new laptop ($2,000 budget) and $500 WFH setup budget.
Interested in this company?
Skip straight to final-round interviews by applying through Triplebyte.