Local by default.
Inference runs on the user's device. No telemetry leaves without explicit, per-event consent. Cloud is opt-in, never default.
About Somach Inc.
We are building the memory layer for human health.
Why now
Cloud health was a 15-year detour.
For a decade, health tech meant: upload everything, trust the server, hope for compliance. It produced great EHR companies and zero patient ownership. The phones we carry now run multimodal AI inference locally. The thesis flipped. Memory of the body — every prescription, every test, every observation — can finally stay on the body that produced it.
Photo · founder portrait · 1:1
Principles
Four constraints. Non-negotiable.
Plain-text foundation.
Records are Markdown files. Portable. Auditable. Yours forever, regardless of whether Somach exists in 30 years.
Hardware-aware.
Partnered with Qualcomm. Tuned for Snapdragon NPUs. Designed to work on the $200 Android phones that 80% of our market actually owns.
Earned distribution.
No paid acquisition until product-market fit is undeniable. Every user is a real one, won through demos, founders we trust, and clinics that adopt us because the alternative is worse.
Capital efficiency over headcount.
$0 server costs (because there are no servers). One founder, network of advisors, contracted specialists when needed. We hire the second person when there is no other way to ship the next milestone.
Public progress.
Every win, every loss, every architecture decision lives in public — on the Play Store, in the Discord, in this site. Trust compounds with visibility.
Founder
Carl Kho.
Computational Sciences (Minerva University, '26). Previously Site Reliability Engineering at Dell — built AI fault-injection for 100TB+ clusters. Won the Qualcomm × Nexa on-device AI bounty (Grand Champion, March 2026). Picked in Google's APAC Top 50 Gen AI Elite. Final-round Thiel Fellow.
Cebu → Seoul → Hyderabad → San Francisco. Built Health Passport because his grandmother's medication list lived on the back of an envelope, and his mother's lab history lived in seven different folders. The system was the problem.
Receipts
A short list of public proof.
Wins
- Qualcomm × Nexa Grand Champion · $6,500 · March 2026
- Google AI for Impact · Top 1 of 22,900 · $8,000 · 2025
- Omi MCP Developer Grand Prize · $25,000 · 2025
- Google Cloud Gen AI · Top 50 APAC · May 2026
- USD Fowler Global Social Innovation · Finalist · $25k legal · May 2026
- Thiel Fellowship · Final round field interview · March 2026
Active programs
- Founders Inc. · Canopy '26 (current)
- Off Season II · in-person SF · Jun 24 - Aug 7
- Google Play Accelerator · invited cohort
- Qualcomm AI Partnerships · hardware support, no equity