This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Ignacio Berardi, Co-Founder and CEO of Rexi, an AI-native financial operations platform rebuilding the infrastructure layer beneath modern fintech. Rexi automates reconciliation, accelerates financial close, and replaces fragile manual back-office workflows with intelligent agentic systems — building what Ignacio describes as the operating system for modern finance.

They discuss how the rapid proliferation of application-layer fintech providers has created a fragmented, modular financial stack in which money movement passes through multiple abstraction layers, making end-to-end transaction tracking increasingly difficult and resulting in systemic balance-sheet write-offs of one to two percent of total payment volume — a problem the Synapse collapse made viscerally real when over $160 million in user funds went unaccounted for overnight. Ignacio explains how Rexi approaches this as fundamentally a coordination problem: ingesting data files from disparate systems, parsing and standardising them with AI at speed, and deploying agents trained across the full portfolio of customer edge cases to investigate discrepancies and close out the long tail of exceptions that human teams routinely write off.

The conversation covers Rexi’s go-to-market approach — founder-led, in-person sales targeting operators rather than crowded enterprise conferences, with six-to-eight-week forward-deployed implementations designed to build trust inside critical financial infrastructure. With a seed round targeted for Q3 2026 and the team approaching 50k MRR, Ignacio explains why brand and relationships, not product features, will be the lasting competitive differentiator in an AI-commoditised market. He also shares hard-won leadership lessons drawn from Bain, Bitso, and Harvard Business School, and why no amount of prior experience truly prepares a founder for the consequential, real-time decisions of building a company from scratch.

Find more about Rexi here: https://Rexi.finance

Follow Ignacio Berardi here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ignacio-Berardi/

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Kim Smith, Founder and CEO of Health Evolve, a South Carolina-based femtech company building patient-centred technologies at the intersection of care and culture. Kim founded Health Evolve in 2023 following the loss of her daughter Lauren to HELLP Syndrome, naming the company’s flagship platform in her honour.

They discuss why the patient’s voice is the most underrated lever in closing health equity gaps, and how Health Evolve co-designed Lauren — with birthing women, nurses, and physicians across urban and rural communities — to be genuinely inclusive. Lauren supports women across a full 100 weeks of care, from preconception through early parenting, combining remote blood pressure and glucose monitoring, an AI-driven personalised education curriculum, and a telemedicine suite with real-time translation to fill the critical gaps between a high-risk woman’s average six hours of provider contact throughout pregnancy.

The conversation covers how Health Evolve is navigating long enterprise sales cycles by building a Research and Community Partnerships division as a deliberate profit centre, with an active clinical validation study at South Carolina’s largest academic hospital and a data partnership with the University of South Carolina drawing on 50 years of birth data. Kim also shares leadership lessons from 18 years spanning Tenet Healthcare’s 24 national markets, and her approach to protecting mental health whilst carrying a life-or-death mission — including her first-ever Power 24, a quarterly solo reset she’s making non-negotiable.

Find more about Health Evolve here: https://healthevolve.co

Follow Kim Smith here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimsmithceo/

This week on Tech Can't Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Julio Martinez-Clark, co-founder and CEO of BioAccess, the world's first contract research organization (CRO) purpose-built specifically for first-in-human (FIH) clinical trials. They discuss the "valley of death" that claims roughly 90% of healthcare startups, which frequently fail not because their technology is flawed, but because they run out of capital before securing vital clinical data.

Julio explains how BioAccess helps medtech, biopharma, and radiopharma startups bypass these bottlenecks by compressing clinical timelines by 40% through efficient, predictable site selection and activation in regulatory-friendly Latin American markets. The conversation covers BioAccess's self-funded growth strategy, common pitfalls made by first-time founders, and how providing low-income patients with compassionate, advanced healthcare brings dignity back to clinical research. Julio also reflects on his time writing his book, La Cebolla de Pandora, and how that period of reflection shaped his deep commitment to prioritizing human impact over profit.

Healthcare startups face a high monthly burn rate averaging $300,000 to $400,000, making rapid first-in-human clinical data crucial to surviving the "valley of death" before they can raise more capital or secure an exit. Cost-efficiency in Latin American clinical settings does not mean lower standards, as all trials strictly adhere to the international ICH and GCP guidelines required by the FDA and EMA.

By leveraging an extensive network of hospitals and regulatory-friendly environments in countries like Panama and El Salvador, BioAccess achieves rapid site activation and patient recruitment.

Beyond the B2B framework, accelerating these trials democratizes access to life-saving medical innovations for lower-income patient populations who otherwise lack treatment options.

Find more about BioAccess here: https://www.bioaccessla.com

Follow Julio Martinez-Clark here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliomartinezclark/