Avena Technologies has processed more than four million patient consultations across a network of over fifteen thousand health specialists in Mexico and Latin America. The company has been profitable and has grown primarily through bootstrapping since its seed round. Its clients include Novo Nordisk and PepsiCo Health and Nutrition Sciences. It was selected for Bayer’s acceleration program. Now, the company is launching Alva Health in the United States.
Ruben Sandoval Davila, the co-founder and CTO who built the technical infrastructure behind those numbers, is leading the platform’s adaptation for the U.S. market. Alva Health, accessible at alvahealth.io, is designed as an AI-native hybrid care platform that embeds the clinical architecture Sandoval developed over several years of production deployment in Latin America into a system built for American regulatory and workflow requirements.
“By embedding AI directly into the clinical workflow, rather than as a separate tool, we reduce administrative overhead and increase the number of patients a single provider can effectively manage,” Sandoval said. “At scale, this changes access to care.”
The platform Sandoval built operates on a model he describes as hybrid AI-human care. The system automates documentation, scheduling, plan generation, and billing while keeping human specialists in the loop at the clinical touchpoints where their judgment and patient rapport produce the strongest outcomes. The model produces long-term patient retention rates that are, by the standards of consumer digital health, unusual. In an industry where most apps lose the majority of their users within weeks, Avena’s hybrid approach has kept patients engaged for periods measured in months and years rather than days. That durability represents a qualitatively different kind of product, and it is the metric that enterprise buyers evaluate most closely.
