Podcast · Jul 30, 2026
Is AI the radiologist's new labour? Kalyan Sivasailam on The Healthcare Tribe
Amit Gandhi hosts a two-hour conversation with Kalyan Sivasailam, Founder & CEO of 5C Network, and Sudhir Rao of Celesta Capital — the fund that backed 5C years before AI became the industry's default vocabulary. Below is the chapter guide and a set of attributed excerpts, published with a link to the full episode.
What the episode covers
There are roughly 3,700 diseases visible in radiology, and the world adds 3 billion imaging scans a year — more than the supply of radiologists can keep up with. Kalyan Sivasailam explains how 5C Network is building an AI copilot for radiologists: why teleradiology was the right entry point, how 5C trains its AI models for medical imaging, and what makes an AI company defensible when engineering and law both matter. Sudhir Rao of Celesta Capital adds the investor's view — what VCs look for in AI healthcare startups, why Celesta invested in 5C, and what it takes to build a global healthcare AI company from India.
Episode chapters
- 00:00 Introduction: is AI the radiologist's new labour?
- 01:09 Meet Kalyan: building an AI copilot for every radiologist
- 05:21 From computer science to healthcare founder
- 09:52 Why teleradiology was the right starting point
- 13:07 Scaling radiologists with AI: the real opportunity
- 20:03 What VCs look for in AI healthcare startups
- 32:31 Why Celesta Capital invested in 5C Network
- 47:55 Engineering, law, and building a defensible AI company
- 51:20 How 5C Network trains AI models for medical imaging
- 58:05 The future of AI in radiology and healthcare
- 1:13:02 Building a global healthcare AI company from India
- 1:53:18 Final thoughts: the next decade of AI in medicine
Selected excerpts
Transcribed by 5C Network from the episode audio and lightly edited for clarity. © The Healthcare Tribe — quoted here with attribution; the full conversation belongs to the podcast.
On what 5C is building
“5C is trying to build an AI assistant for every radiologist on the planet. With the growing demand for imaging, the amount of high-quality labour that we have cannot catch up, fundamentally and structurally. This is where we believe that AI could create a new class of almost digital labour — a software worker, if you will — that can augment the existing high-skilled labour force.”
On why Celesta backed 5C
“This engineer had the possibility to become a clinician. That's what I saw — because we needed to bring data and domain together to solve a real problem.”
On how 5C builds its AI
“Today over 50% of our team is fully dedicated towards R&D — the annotation of data, building, testing, validating of AI models so that we can get them to a place where they can be deployed in the real world.”
On AI as a second workforce
“If you think about AI as labour, one way that we like to think about 5C is: 5C is a radiology business that has two types of labour. There is specialised manual labour and there are AI agents, and both of them work together to deliver an outcome.”
On what the product must guarantee
“The outcome of this product will be that no radiologist should read a case cold. Reading a case cold is one of the main reasons why people make mistakes.”
The model the episode describes, in our words
The two-workforce idea Kalyan describes on the podcast is Bionic Radiology in practice: AI runs the diagnostic workflow — triage, detection across hundreds of pathologies, drafting, quality checks — and a board-certified radiologist reviews, corrects and signs every report. That hybrid intelligence layer is what makes it safe to run at 15,000+ scans a day across 2,000+ Indian hospitals — so that no radiologist ever reads a case cold.
See it on your own scans
