Brandon Ballinger
FounderFounder at Empirical Health
New York, New York, United States
FoundedEmpirical Health Β· YC
About
Brandon Ballinger co-founded Empirical Health, which applies AI to preventive cardiology, and previously co-founded Cardiogram, a deep learning company focused on heart disease detection that was acquired. He has held senior technical roles at Google leading machine learning for speech recognition, served as Head of Risk Engineering at Brex, and contributed to the HealthCare.gov recovery effort.
Brandon Ballinger @bballinger
Drug development sounds an awful lot like startups. https://t.co/p6LnNpkXdl
Jul 22, 2026 Β· β₯ 5 Β· β 1
Brandon Ballinger @bballinger
Right now only 1% of eligible patients use injectable PCSK9 inhibitors, but that's going to change since the FDA just approved the first PCSK9 pill, enlicitide. Cuts LDL cholesterol/ApoB by 50-60% AND reduces Lp(a) by 28%: https://t.co/AfzhegmSZG
Jul 16, 2026 Β· β₯ 5 Β· β 1
Brandon Ballinger @bballinger
I went through @ycombinator when I was 27, and again at 39. It was arguably more useful the second time around. YC is the YC for founders 35+. https://t.co/VM1PHlChNd
Jun 17, 2026 Β· β₯ 15
Founder at Empirical HealthYC S23
Intro paths
Brandon went through Y Combinator (Summer 2023) β any YC alum in your network can reach them through the YC community.
Their group partner at YC was Garry Tan, President & CEO of Y Combinator β the partner who ran Empirical Health's batch and knows the company first-hand. YC profile β
In turn, Brandon can intro founders to Empirical Health's investors below.
Empirical Health's investors Β· 3
Co-founders at Empirical Health
Experience
- Empirical HealthCo-Foundercurrent2023 β presentNew York, NY
- BrexHead of Risk Engineering2020 β 2022New York, NY
- CardiogramCo-Founder2016 β 2021San Francisco Bay Area
- UCSF CardiologyData Science & Machine Learning2014 β 2016San Francisco Bay Area
- HealthCare.gov Rescue TeamBug Fixer2013 β 2014Columbia, MD
- SiftCo-Founder & CTO2011 β 2013San Francisco, CA
- GoogleStaff Software Engineer2006 β 2011San Francisco Bay Area
Education
- University of WashingtonBachelor's Degree, Computer Science2002 β 2006
Skills & more
+12 more
Natural Language ProcessingData VisualizationDistributed SystemsLinux KernelFraud DetectionLarge Scale SystemsEntrepreneurshipData MiningMobile ApplicationsSpeech RecognitionStart-upsBig DataFrom Brandon's professional profile.
Same school
Also attended University of Washington186
+ 180 more
Shared employers
Also worked at Empirical Health2
Also worked at Brex28
+ 22 more
