Hims & Hers hired Cruise's ex-CTO to lead its bet on AI-built personalized care

Direct-to-consumer telehealth and wellness: connects customers with licensed clinicians for men's and women's health, mental health and weight-loss treatment.

That leaders who shipped AI in self-driving — high-stakes, heavily regulated, trust-is-everything — can do the same for clinical care, where AI helps doctors decide.

Founded in San Francisco in 2017; added 'Hers' in 2018 when it entered women's health. Two years before the CTO hire it had trained MedMatch, a model built on its own patient dataset that helps doctors pick mental-health treatments.

By May 2025 the company had anonymized data from millions of patients — clinical visits, prescribed medications, whether the drugs worked — feeding AI models intended to eventually help diagnose and treat. That same week it named former Amazon executive Nader Kabbani chief of operations. Every AI tool keeps a human clinician in the loop and shows the reasoning and weights behind its recommendations.

The hire only makes sense as a bet: Dudum explicitly shopped in the AV industry because its AI runs where mistakes harm people and regulators watch.

Elshenawy's own framing closes the logic — self-driving and healthcare share complex, high-stakes, heavily regulated, trust-first conditions.

The company already had the raw material for clinical AI: millions of anonymized patient records and a working model, MedMatch, from two years earlier.

If the safety-first play works, AI extends clinician capacity and precision; if it fails, it hands critics of AI in healthcare a flagship example.

When AI decisions are regulated and high-stakes, the safest shortcut is people who already shipped AI under those constraints — Dudum shopped for a CTO by industry, not by résumé.

As of 2025-05-08, Elshenawy had just been announced; the AI agenda he was hired to accelerate was already visible — MedMatch in mental health, human-in-the-loop clinical tools that expose the reasoning behind each recommendation, and models in training on the patient dataset. Nader Kabbani was starting as chief of operations. The company had also recently added mental health and weight-loss treatments to a catalog that began with erectile dysfunction and hair loss.