Hippocratic AI Raises $53 Mn in Series A Funding Led by Premji Invest & General Catalyst

The fresh capital infusion will help Hippocratic AI fund safety tests and further develop the healthcare staffing marketplace.

Hippocratic AI, a pioneering company dedicated to building the first safety-focused Large Language Model (LLM) for healthcare, has bagged $53 million in Series A funding round.

The round, which values the company at $500 million, marks a significant milestone for the healthcare tech industry. With the latest fundraise, its total funding has now reached $120 million.

The Series A funding round was co-led by Premji Invest and General Catalyst. Other notable participants included SV Angel, Memorial Hermann Health System, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, and Universal Health Services (UHS).

The company also rolled out its product staffing marketplace for healthcare for phase-III safety testing.

The fresh capital infusion will be used to fund these safety tests and further develop the product, Hippocratic AI said in a statement.

Hippocratic AI’s Staffing Marketplace for Healthcare

The shortage of healthcare professionals is one of the major challenges facing health systems in the West today. Hippocratic AI aims to address these through its Gen AI-powered staffing marketplace.

Per the company, this platform enables health systems, payors, and other stakeholders to "hire" AI agents capable of completing low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing tasks.

For instance, the generative AI agents can take patient follow-ups, communicate with them, follow up and fill pharmacy prescriptions, book appointments on their behalf, etc.

Sharing thoughts, Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner, Premji Invest, “Hippocratic AI’s approach towards safe AI helps further the Foundation’s mission. The team has the potential to transform healthcare with an LLM that is safe and effective. We look forward to working with this ambitious and talented team to achieve better outcomes for patients around the globe.”

Hemant Taneja, CEO & MD, General Catalyst, too, praised Hippocratic AI's rapid growth and steadfast commitment to safety.

He highlighted the company's collaborative approach and its potential to transform the healthcare system by making it more proactive, affordable, and equitable.

“Since the founding of Hippocratic AI a year ago, the company trained its foundational model, achieved a key safety threshold, identified novel use cases to solve the healthcare staffing crisis, and established partnerships with 40 health systems, payors, and digital health companies,” Taneja added.

Safety Tests of Staffing Marketplace

Hippocratic AI said it decided to move to phase-III safety testing based on the promising outcomes of phase-I and phase-II testing.

Over 1000 US licensed nurses and 130 US licensed physicians participated in phase-I and phase-II testing, where they assumed the role of patients and interacted with Hippocratic AI’s agents across various scenarios.

Following each interaction, participants evaluated the AI agents based on subjective and objective safety measures, comparing them to real nurses and other Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and LLaMA 2 70B Chat.

The findings of these tests were detailed in a paper titled "Polaris: A Safety-focused LLM Constellation Architecture for Healthcare," released on Monday.

According to the company, subjective measures, assessed against human nurses, revealed high levels of comfort and effectiveness in interacting with Hippocratic AI's agents.

For instance, 88.93% of participants felt comfortable confiding in the AI/Nurse, while 85.66% considered the AI/Nurse as effective as an average nurse in delivering care.

In terms of specialist support model safety, Hippocratic AI's Constellation demonstrated superior performance compared to other LLMs and human nurses across various tasks.

Notably, the Constellation excelled in identifying medication impacts on lab values, with a score of 79.61%, outperforming other models and even human nurses.

When evaluating the full Constellation system safety, Hippocratic AI's AI/Nurse exhibited remarkable accuracy in providing correct medical advice, with a stellar score of 96.79%

For its phase-III testing, the company has enlisted the support of its extensive network of partners.

Munjal Shah, cofounder & CEO, Hippocratic AI, reaffirmed the company's commitment to safety as its top priority. He emphasized the importance of transparency and collaboration in driving the company's safety-first approach.

“When we started the company, we prioritized safety as our top value. This is why we named the company after the physician’s Hippocratic Oath and made the tagline ‘Do no harm,’” added Shah.

According to him, the focus is on safety testing our product in multiple phases and transparent publication of the results for everyone to see is the next down payment in this safety-first journey.