The first Canvas BUILD Summit kicks off this morning in San Francisco. We’re making the Presidio Log Cabin our fertile ground for innovation and exploration. Fifty builders, clinicians, and engineers - an exclusive group of invited customers, partners, and the Canvas team - are spending the day building healthcare software together.
This isn't a conference. There are no keynotes, no booths, and certainly no vendor pitches. Everyone in the room is here to build something and deploy it before the clock strikes happy hour.
We'll be updating this post throughout the day. Check back in for live dispatches from Build.
9 AM Welcome
Clients started congregating at The Log Cabin at the Presidio.
Canvas team members are on hand to help anyone finishing setup for the two workshop tracks: CPA, which runs in the command line using Claude Code and the Canvas Plugin Assistant, and Studio, Canvas's new in-product coding agent that runs entirely in the browser.
9:15 AM Fireside Chat
Arif Sorathia Founder of Practice with Joy, and an Investor at Route 66 Ventures, in conversation with Canvas Medical CEO Adam Farren
“We’re starting to see clinicians wanting to not be clinicians anymore. Now is the opportunity .. Practice with Joy is basically building the full practice-enabled tech system for high-quality care,” says Arif.
“We looked at all of the players out there. What became very clear is a full, headless EMR form scratch is a bunch of commodity work. Canvas is the only place where you can build something purely bespoke, but not having to build everything from scratch. That was our initial pick on Canvas relative to all our other players.”
You’re actually running the entire clinical visit with a bespoke AI inside Canvas. “There’s no other place where you can do it.”
Arif asserts there should be more collaboration in the healthcare startup ecosystem- all healthcare startups are essentially up against the mega hospital industrial complex.
Wearing his nvestor hat, he pontificates - “In five years, would you rather be in a services business with 40% margins or software business with 60% margins?” (The answer is obvious).
Arif invested in Canvas a year ago from Route 66 Ventures. “More bullish now than we were at time of investment. We see more of a future where you can build a bespoke EMR without hiring the manpower to build it.”
In response to Adam’s question “What should I be thinking about right now? Arif says: “Healthcare is hard. The more you can build the things that nobody in this room wants to build, you’ll build a much more durable business. Value is accrued with the really hard things.”
9:30 AM Canvas Studio launches!
Canvas Studio is a new in-product coding agent built on Anthropic's Claude Code, that lets anyone describe a plugin in plain language and have working code generated inside Canvas. There’s no command line and no dev environment setup necessary. The steps?
- You describe what you want to build
- Studio writes it
- You deploy it
“All the power, with all the simplicity,” says Andrew Hines, founder & CTO of Canvas. “This software is going to lead us into this era of abundance.”
We announced another tool that they we’re developing internally. ****Chief Engineering Officer Beau Gunderson debuts NAVIGATOR, Canvas’s support Slack agent, that is in all of our clients’ Slack channels. Given the infinite demand and finite support, it’s clear the support team is swamped.
🏃🏻♀️ The workshop is now underway. Both tracks - CPA and Studio - are running simultaneously in breakout spaces. The Canvas team is embedded at every table.
