Less than a year after emerging from stealth with little more than a vague mission to transform healthcare through the power of “safety-focused” generative AI, Hippocratic AI took the stage at NVIDIA’s GTC conference to announce the close of its $53M Series A round.
When Hippocratic debuted last May, it hadn’t yet decided on its first use case, despite closing more seed funding than any company we’d ever covered ($50M).
- In July, it raised an additional $15M and partnered with 10 healthcare providers for model evaluation, including Cincinnati Children’s, HonorHealth, and SonderMind.
- Now, Hippocratic found its use case, as well as a $500M valuation.
The first product Hippocratic is rolling out for phase 3 safety testing: a staffing marketplace where healthcare orgs can “hire” generative AI agents that complete low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing tasks.
- Initial roles for the AI agents include chronic care management, post-discharge follow-up for specific conditions (congestive heart failure, kidney disease), as well as SDOH surveys, health risk assessments, and pre-operative outreach.
- The agents won’t be allowed to speak with patients unsupervised until phase three testing is completed, which involves its 40+ partners and 5,500 licensed clinicians interfacing with the agents as if they were patients.
Shareholder hero and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated a care manager agent named “Diana” on stage at GTC, and this video of the demo will tell you everything you need to know about the look and feel of Hippocratic’s first product.
- NVIDIA also announced that it’ll be working alongside Hippocratic to develop “super-low-latency conversational interactions,” which will reportedly cost about $9/hr to run on the company’s hardware.
Critics are hard to avoid when you hit a half-billion valuation before launching a product and start throwing around terms like “Health General Intelligence (HGI).” Most critics seem concerned about medical device classifications, venture capital mania, and some past lawsuits, but time will tell which critiques (if any) can stop Hippocratic’s momentum.
The Takeaway
Despite all the talk about whether a general purpose healthcare AI is possible or safe, Hippocratic has an elite roster of VCs and provider partners that are willing to help it find out. Hippocratic definitely has the talking points nailed, now we’ll have to wait and see whether it has the operational chops to back them up.
