Albatrus's Apollo AI reaches 70% of Japan's 5,000 hospitals

Albatrus was founded by Sento Hoshino, whose family runs a general hospital in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, and who set up the company to solve problems he encountered helping with the family business. That background shapes the design goals Apollo AI lists: removing vendor lock-in, allowing multiple agents to run, and building a product with more added value than existing systems. The vendor-lock-in goal appears to be making progress, since Apollo AI is now usable at 70% of Japan's 5,000 hospitals.

The hospital-focused generative AI market is currently active, and Hoshino saw issues in it, including price competition where companies without a technical edge have little choice but to cut prices. Vendor lock-in is another concern, and simply writing text or transcribing audio is unlikely to reform hospitals fundamentally. Apollo AI is positioned as an attempt to address those issues.

Like other industries, healthcare faces a labor shortage, and system-related work is substantial. The hospital electronic medical record market is cited at 300 billion yen as evidence of a widening market, and Albatrus aims for Apollo AI to become the core system that follows it.