About us

LeanOn brings together three perspectives that rarely meet: that of a researcher in safety-critical AI, that of a patient who has walked the entire oncology path herself, and that of a biophysicist who turns complex methods into tools people actually use.

Constantin Selzer

Founder

Constantin is doing his doctorate in AI development for autonomous driving: systems people trust with their lives. Building software like that teaches a discipline that is rare in the software world: every model decision needs traceable limits, every automation a deterministic frame, every failure case a defined safe state.

Two years ago, his fiancée was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Alongside the illness came a second, avoidable fight, against the organisation of the treatment: appointments on slips of paper, symptoms carried in memory, findings in paper binders. Out of that experience he founded LeanOn, and he builds the product with the method he knows from autonomous driving.

That gives him his principle for LeanOn: the AI writes drafts, but it never decides urgency; deterministic, testable rules do. And patient data is processed and stored on the clinic's hardware, not in a cloud.

Laila Haas

Co-founder

Laila has walked the complete oncology path herself: diagnosis, treatment and aftercare for tongue cancer. Around that journey she has built a community of more than 56,000 people (41,000 on TikTok, 15,000 on Instagram): cancer patients and their relatives.

At LeanOn she is responsible for the patient side: what a person in treatment can actually take in, what has to stay private, when an escalation is genuinely necessary. Her community is not a marketing channel for this but a direct line to the people the product is for: questions to real patients, answers within a week, committed pilot users from day one.

Her yardstick is her own experience: every patient-facing decision in the product is tested against whether it would have helped in her own treatment. LeanOn is meant to be the tool she would have needed herself.

Dr. Tom Burkart

Co-founder

Tom earned his doctorate in theoretical biophysics and is now a postdoc at MIT. His research combines mathematical modelling, simulation and AI to better understand complex biological systems. What occupies him is not only what is technologically possible, but also how complex methods become tools that people can actually use.

He brings that perspective to the development of LeanOn: technology should support everyday life without becoming another burden itself. The app should be simple and intuitive, and at the same time built so that the people using it need not worry about the protection of their data.

Most important to him is that patients stay in control of their own data at all times. During cancer, when so much in life is suddenly decided by others, LeanOn should give back a measure of control: through a clearer overview, reliable support, and the sense of not facing the challenges of treatment alone.