Hippocratic AI Raises $141M, Valued at $1.64B in Series B
Hippocratic AI, a pioneering company in the development of safety-focused Large Language Models (LLMs) for healthcare, has announced the completion of its Series B financing round. The company raised $141 million in this round, valuing it at $1.64 billion. This significant investment was led by Kleiner Perkins, a renowned venture capital firm known for backing successful companies like Google, Amazon, and Genentech. Existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), General Catalyst, Premji, NVIDIA, SV Angel, Universal Health Services (UHS), and WellSpan Health, also participated in the round, maintaining or increasing their stakes.
The new capital will be used to further expand the company’s reach into new verticals such as pharmaceuticals and payors, as well as entering new markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. This strategic move aims to accelerate the development and deployment of Hippocratic AI’s GenAI-driven super staffing solutions, which are designed to address the global healthcare staffing shortages.
Hippocratic AI was co-founded by CEO Munjal Shah, alongside a group of physicians, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals, and artificial intelligence researchers from esteemed institutions like El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA. The company’s mission is to develop the safest LLM for healthcare, focusing on non-diagnostic, patient-facing clinical tasks. This approach is based on the belief that a safe LLM can dramatically improve healthcare accessibility and health outcomes worldwide by bringing deep healthcare expertise to every human.
The company has made significant strides in the past nine months. It raised its Series A with the support of Premji and NVIDIA, released its Polaris 2.0 architecture, expanded its nurse, physician, and industry advisory councils, received its first US patent, achieved safety parity of its AI agents with human clinicians, signed contracts with 23 health systems, payors, and pharma clients in just 23 weeks, launched 16 of those clients, and received a positive reception from patients. The GenAI agents have conducted hundreds of thousands of patient calls, earning an average rating of 8.7 out of 10.
In addition to the funding news, Hippocratic AI unveiled its AI Agent App Store, a breakthrough platform for clinician-driven healthcare AI development. This user-friendly system allows healthcare professionals to create customized AI agents for specific medical needs and workflows in under 30 minutes without coding experience. The store debuts with over 300 AI agents across 25 medical handling tasks, including cervical cancer check-ins, postpartum mental health support, wound care, and diabetes screening. Each agent undergoes thorough safety and efficacy verification through a three-step process, including licensure verification, development testing, and validation by over 6,000 nurses and 300 doctors.
Mamoon Hamid, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, expressed enthusiasm for supporting Hippocratic AI, stating that the total addressable market for using generative AI to solve healthcare staffing shortages is probably 10 times the size of the healthcare software market alone. He emphasized the importance of ethical AI development and deployment in medicine, highlighting the need to balance innovation with responsibility to ensure that medical AI serves patients’ and society’s best interests.
Hippocratic AI’s unique approach to safety includes a three-part strategy: a primary model trained using evidence-based content, a novel constellation architecture with multiple models totaling over one trillion parameters, and built-in guardrails that bring in a human supervisor when necessary. This comprehensive approach has enabled the company to achieve safety parity with human clinicians and has positioned it as a leading standard in radical collaboration in healthcare.
The company has partnered with founding health systems such as UHS, Honor Health, WellSpan Health, Cincinnati Children’s, OhioHealth, and Memorial Hermann, agreeing not to launch until the product was as safe as a human nurse. This milestone was achieved earlier this year with the launch of its Polaris 2.0 product, which increased the number of parameters (intelligence) of the model from 1.1 trillion parameters to 3.7 trillion parameters.
Hippocratic AI has received a total of $278 million in funding and is backed by leading investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, NVIDIA’s NVentures, Premji Invest, SV Angel, and six health systems. The company’s commitment to safety and its innovative approach to addressing healthcare challenges have positioned it as a critical player in transforming the healthcare system to make it more proactive, affordable, and equitable.
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