Oleksandr Zakharchuk, left, and Victor Bornstein are the founders of Justpoint. (Courtesy Justpoint)
Victor Bornstein’s uncle was being poisoned.
He grew up in the countryside of Chile, right near a river that provided his drinking water. While the proximity was a plus, he didn’t know a large mining company was dumping heavy metals and chemicals into it upstream.
After consuming the polluted supply for a large chunk of his life, he got sick, according to his nephew. Though he and other neighbors eventually connected the dots and sued the corporation, they didn’t get the results they were looking for.
“He didn’t have as many resources as the mining company did, so it didn’t go so well,” said Bornstein, a Boulder resident.
Now Bornstein’s startup, Justpoint, aims to uncover potentially harmful drugs, medications and materials like the ones that tainted his uncle’s water — and get more lawsuits going.
“Currently you get away with, as a company, doing things that are not to the benefit of society. You get away with selling opioids or knowingly spreading PFAS,” Bornstein said, noting two famous class-action suits.
The business, which he started in 2018 with former Google engineer Oleksandr Zakharchuk, uses artificial intelligence to scour medical records or other data points to find harmful substances that haven’t been revealed before.
Justpoint raised $95 million last month, led by San Francisco-based SignalFire. That includes a $50 million line of credit.
“It’s really how to get med records data and understand patterns, like is Ozempic having more adverse events than stated to the FDA?” Bornstein said of Justpoint’s process.
His team then gives that information to a law firm, also called Justpoint, to prosecute the cases.
“It takes law firms and the court system a long time to understand them,” Bornstein said. “Knowing that information ahead of time just allows lawyers to be much quicker to make the right decision on how to act, how to spend money and which claims to file.”
Justpoint gets the vast majority of that data from potential plaintiffs of the law firm, who send it to Bornstein’s company to analyze after initial consultations.
Justpoint wasn’t always in the consumer product space, having specialized in malpractice data analysis from its 2018 founding through mid-2023, so there’s some leftover data from that iteration that his team is parsing as well.
“It saves a lot of time and confirms damages or something (plaintiffs) saw,” Bornstein said. “We help (firms) process claims, and we’re also discovering existing drugs that have adverse trends.”
Bornstein said he made the pivot to consumer products about two years ago because he saw a chance to have a wider impact.
“We realized that we could be much more successful at our goal of preventing harm if we were detecting product liability. With single events, it’s very difficult to detect accidents ahead of time,” he said.
“Now, if you can attack product liability, a drug that is causing addiction in teenagers for example, not only do we have a big competitive advantage when it comes to business, but we also have a big impact,” he added. “If only someone could have detected that opioids are as addictive as they are 10 years prior than they did, we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”
When it was pursuing medical malpractice cases, Justpoint helped recover an average settlement of around $300,000, Bornstein said.
Its tech is currently being used in five lawsuits, and he expects those to award up to $600 million in damages. He said the specifics will be announced later in the year. His company makes money by getting an undisclosed percentage of settlements.
“They are likely going to be as big as the opioid crisis,” he said of the cases.
The $95 million that Justpoint raised is its biggest round, and the first since the company changed its focus. It took in about $10 million in funding during its malpractice era, Bornstein said.
Bornstein was born in Brazil and came to the U.S. at age 25 to pursue a doctorate in biomedical sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. He worked in the drug discovery space there, but the slow-paced nature of academia left him wanting more.
With Justpoint, he is able to be more proactive rather than waiting on things like grant funding, he said.
“The tech space had all the things I wanted in life,” he said. “To do research that has a greater impact in the world, and both academia and startups have multicultural teams with different knowledge needed to collaborate, which I enjoy.”
Justpoint has roughly 200 people on payroll between full-time staff and contractors, most of whom live in the United States or Poland. The company is completely remote, said Bornstein, who moved to Colorado from New York in 2020.
He hopes to use some of the new cash infusion to hire around 30 people in the short term. He said he expects Justpoint’s staff to double over the next year as well. The remaining money will likely be spent on building up the software’s computing power, a costly barrier to entry for many young companies.
Oleksandr Zakharchuk, left, and Victor Bornstein are the founders of Justpoint. (Courtesy Justpoint)
Victor Bornstein’s uncle was being poisoned.
He grew up in the countryside of Chile, right near a river that provided his drinking water. While the proximity was a plus, he didn’t know a large mining company was dumping heavy metals and chemicals into it upstream.
After consuming the polluted supply for a large chunk of his life, he got sick, according to his nephew. Though he and other neighbors eventually connected the dots and sued the corporation, they didn’t get the results they were looking for.
“He didn’t have as many resources as the mining company did, so it didn’t go so well,” said Bornstein, a Boulder resident.
Now Bornstein’s startup, Justpoint, aims to uncover potentially harmful drugs, medications and materials like the ones that tainted his uncle’s water — and get more lawsuits going.
“Currently you get away with, as a company, doing things that are not to the benefit of society. You get away with selling opioids or knowingly spreading PFAS,” Bornstein said, noting two famous class-action suits.
The business, which he started in 2018 with former Google engineer Oleksandr Zakharchuk, uses artificial intelligence to scour medical records or other data points to find harmful substances that haven’t been revealed before.
Justpoint raised $95 million last month, led by San Francisco-based SignalFire. That includes a $50 million line of credit.
“It’s really how to get med records data and understand patterns, like is Ozempic having more adverse events than stated to the FDA?” Bornstein said of Justpoint’s process.
His team then gives that information to a law firm, also called Justpoint, to prosecute the cases.
“It takes law firms and the court system a long time to understand them,” Bornstein said. “Knowing that information ahead of time just allows lawyers to be much quicker to make the right decision on how to act, how to spend money and which claims to file.”
Justpoint gets the vast majority of that data from potential plaintiffs of the law firm, who send it to Bornstein’s company to analyze after initial consultations.
Justpoint wasn’t always in the consumer product space, having specialized in malpractice data analysis from its 2018 founding through mid-2023, so there’s some leftover data from that iteration that his team is parsing as well.
“It saves a lot of time and confirms damages or something (plaintiffs) saw,” Bornstein said. “We help (firms) process claims, and we’re also discovering existing drugs that have adverse trends.”
Bornstein said he made the pivot to consumer products about two years ago because he saw a chance to have a wider impact.
“We realized that we could be much more successful at our goal of preventing harm if we were detecting product liability. With single events, it’s very difficult to detect accidents ahead of time,” he said.
“Now, if you can attack product liability, a drug that is causing addiction in teenagers for example, not only do we have a big competitive advantage when it comes to business, but we also have a big impact,” he added. “If only someone could have detected that opioids are as addictive as they are 10 years prior than they did, we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”
When it was pursuing medical malpractice cases, Justpoint helped recover an average settlement of around $300,000, Bornstein said.
Its tech is currently being used in five lawsuits, and he expects those to award up to $600 million in damages. He said the specifics will be announced later in the year. His company makes money by getting an undisclosed percentage of settlements.
“They are likely going to be as big as the opioid crisis,” he said of the cases.
The $95 million that Justpoint raised is its biggest round, and the first since the company changed its focus. It took in about $10 million in funding during its malpractice era, Bornstein said.
Bornstein was born in Brazil and came to the U.S. at age 25 to pursue a doctorate in biomedical sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. He worked in the drug discovery space there, but the slow-paced nature of academia left him wanting more.
With Justpoint, he is able to be more proactive rather than waiting on things like grant funding, he said.
“The tech space had all the things I wanted in life,” he said. “To do research that has a greater impact in the world, and both academia and startups have multicultural teams with different knowledge needed to collaborate, which I enjoy.”
Justpoint has roughly 200 people on payroll between full-time staff and contractors, most of whom live in the United States or Poland. The company is completely remote, said Bornstein, who moved to Colorado from New York in 2020.
He hopes to use some of the new cash infusion to hire around 30 people in the short term. He said he expects Justpoint’s staff to double over the next year as well. The remaining money will likely be spent on building up the software’s computing power, a costly barrier to entry for many young companies.
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