Hippocratic AI is kicking off 2025 with a bang.
The startup, which is building a large language model specifically for healthcare use cases, banked a $141 million series B financing round only nine months after its series A round. The latest funding propels Hippocratic AI's valuation to $1.64 billion, launching it into "unicorn" status, according to executives.
The company is using artificial intelligence to close the gap on the worldwide shortage on healthcare staffing.
Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins led the round. General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) also backed the series B round along with other existing investors Nvidia, Premji, SV Angel, UHS and WellSpan Health, which all participated at or above pro rata, according to the company.
Hippocratic AI has received a total of $278 million in funding from investors.
The company also rolled out a healthcare AI agent app store to enable clinicians to design and shape AI agents to address patient care and operational challenges.
Munjal Shah, a serial entrepreneur, founded Hippocratic AI along with a group of physicians, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals and artificial intelligence researchers from El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, Google and Nvidia.
Hippocratic AI's staffing marketplace enables health systems, payers and others to “hire” generative-AI-powered agents to conduct low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing services to help address the massive shortage of healthcare nurses, social workers and nutritionists in the U.S. and worldwide, according to the company. The agentic, generative-AI-based agents can interact with patients for tasks such as chronic care management or post-discharge follow-up for specific conditions such as congestive heart failure and kidney disease.
The startup has been growing rapidly since launching out of stealth in May 2023. In the past nine months, it raised a $53 million series A in March along with a $17 million follow-on investment from chipmaker Nvidia; released its first commercial product, a generative AI-based, task-specific healthcare agent; released its Polaris 2.0 architecture; expanded its nurse, physician and industry advisory councils; and received its first U.S. patent.
Hippocratic AI says it achieved safety parity of its AI agents with human clinicians. "We've been very deliberate and focused on safety. When I started this company, I said I'm not going to release this product until it's as safe as a human clinician," Shah, CEO of Hippocratic AI, said in an exclusive interview with Fierce Healthcare about the funding and the new AI agent app store.
The startup achieved many milestones in 2024, and that has driven increased interest from investors, Shah said.
Hippocratic AI also signed contracts with 23 health systems, payers and pharma clients in just 23 weeks, Shah said, and it has gone live with 16 of those clients.
In the last few months, the company has gone live with Arkos Health, Belong Health, Cincinnati Children’s, Fraser Health (Canada), GuideHealth, Honor Health, Ideal Dental, Nsight Health, OhioHealth, VNS Health, UHS and WellSpan Health along with others. Hippocratic AI generative AI agents have completed hundreds of thousands of calls to patients of these healthcare organizations, according to the company.
"We've now spoken to over 200,000 patients, and the average rating was an 8.7," Shah said. "These are the things that are unknowns. Can you build a safe product? Check. Will people buy that product? Check. Will the patients like to talk to it? Check. I think the combined momentum and just taking out some of the major milestones that people were waiting for us to prove really allowed us to do this."
The startup will use the new capital to expand the company to more verticals, including pharma and payers and new markets outside the U.S., particularly Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. The funding also will accelerate the development and deployment of its generative AI agents, Shah said.
Generative AI in healthcare is a hot market with a growing list of startups tackling ambient dictation and administrative tasks, but Hippocratic AI decided to go in a different direction.
"We're one of the few people that really said, 'Hey, let's try to attack patient-facing activities.' We know it's harder, we know you have a higher threshold of safety, but we think there's a bigger impact you can make in healthcare if you do that," Shah said.
Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins, said the VC firm has been tracking Hippocratic AI because of its focus on safety and its unique LLM architecture. He noted the company's "incredible" commercial traction.
"It's an incredibly impressive slope of a company being started 18 months ago to building an LLM that is focused on healthcare, and especially building the safety of its protocols, from the ground up. It then partnered with six, seven health systems to build it, and then to get two dozen customers to have them roll it out, and then for them to have hundreds of thousands of hours of calls done with their agents with real human patients, all in a span of 18 months, and the commercial piece of it, really in the last three months," Hamid said. "When you're going to patients, a product can't just 'sort of' work, it has to 'work work.' Hippocratic is all about safe AI. That sort of slope is just rare. The product just works, and customers see it, and they use more hours of the AI agent, and more customers see it and they want to then use it. It's just a big snowball at this point, going down a really steep hill where the momentum is just building and the product is going to get better and better."
Hamid estimated the total addressable market of using generative AI for solving healthcare staffing shortages is likely 10 times the size of the healthcare software market alone.
Hippocratic AI's website now features more than healthcare agent roles that can tackle a range of healthcare tasks including preoperative, chronic care management, post-discharge, nutritionists, assisted living, pharmaceutical clinical trial coordination, patient education, transitions of care check-in and wellness coaching.
The use of AI is helping create an "abundance of healthcare" to keep up with demand for care services as organizations face challenges with staffing shortages, Shah noted.
The company is finding that its AI-based agents can aid providers with contacting patients during natural disasters. A customer in Florida used Hippocratic AI agents to call patients during a major hurricane to check in on their status as well as a customer in California during recent wildfires, Shah said. The agents can aid in contacting patients for dialysis continuity during natural disasters to assess which patients urgently need to come in for care, he noted.
“My main overarching realization about the business is that people think about the task they do today and how AI can help them because they don't have enough clinicians. I think there is a whole host of ways we can use Hippocratic technology to do that,” Shah said. “This also can address long-term, longitudinal vigilance. We can call every single patient every single month that has an overactive bladder and just see if it's getting worse. This really allows for an amplification of the care you can deliver by 10x or 100x.”
Ensuring AI safety
Healthcare providers are understandably cautious about using AI in healthcare, particularly for patient-facing tasks.
Hippocratic AI uses a three-step approach to certify the safety of its product.
“We take this responsibility quite seriously. The power is there if you can ensure the safety,” Shah said.
“Step one was we built this unique constellation architecture where it's not one LLM where 19 are supervising the main one around the things that are the highest risk. We built this unique architecture that nobody's done, and it allowed us to eliminate hallucinations within the scope of nursing,” Shah asserts.
Hippocratic also decided to test the AI based on the output, rather than the input, he noted.
The company developed a clinician-driven safety testing system for LLMs. Phase one testing was conducted by physicians and nurses to ensure the agent completes all critical checklist items with the patient for a given use case. Phase two testing required testing to be completed by more than 1,000 licensed U.S. nurses, and more than 100 U.S. licensed physicians talking to the AI while acting as a patient. Phase three testing required the product to be tested by more than 6,500 licensed U.S. nurses, 500 licensed physicians and the company’s health system partners, the company said.
“We've now done 260,000 test calls,” Shah noted, and the company continues to review of subset of agent calls.
Bringing clinicians into innovation through AI agent app design
Recognizing that clinicians have innovative ideas for AI use cases, Hippocratic launched a healthcare AI agent app store to give nurses, doctors and other clinicians a direct role in crafting AI solutions that meet their needs. Through the agent app store, clinicians can pitch use cases and build AI agents to address challenges in patient care and operational efficiency.
The company says creating an agent can take less than an hour and is followed by safety testing by the app creator and Hippocratic AI staff.
Clinician creators then share in the revenue their agents generate when used by Hippocratic’s customers.
“We believe clinicians know best. We when we founded the company, we said we wanted to partner with the health systems and the clinicians from day one, bring them on as investors day one, but also just bring them on to collaborate day one,” Shah said.
Clinicians, over the course of their careers, develop deep clinical expertise as well as practical insights around specific patient conditions and clinical workflows. Hippocratic wants to tap into clinicians’ expertise to make its AI agents safer, more empathetic and resulting in better patient outcomes, Shah said.
Developing a wide range of AI agent use cases also creates a competitive barrier for Hippocratic as more companies jump into generative AI for healthcare, he noted.
The process for AI agent creators is easy; it does not require software programming knowledge. After Hippocratic has certified the agent and it is used by a Hippocratic customer, the clinician creator will receive 5% of the base fees plus 70% of any premium rate set by the creator. Every clinician will have access to a dashboard to track their AI agent’s performance and use and receive feedback for further development.
The company has built a network of clinician “builders” with more than 300 AI agents focused on over 25 specialties.
Kristina Dulaney, a maternal mental health expert, design an AI agent focused on postpartum and maternal mental health, providing postpartum depression screening.
“The sky is the limit with the opportunities to reach people [using AI]. With my background in a maternal mental health capacity and understanding the crisis that moms are in now, when this opportunity came up, I said, Absolutely, because there's not a lot of people involved with this space that have the expertise of my own lived experience, as well as maternal mental health, to be able to shape and impact the way that AI is used in a safe, effective and successful way,” Dulaney said in an interview.
Shawna Butler, a seasoned nurse with 30 years of expertise, said she was motivated to be involved in Hippocratic’s network of innovators based on the company’s focus on safety and developing AI use cases for nurses.
“They are putting together clinicians actively in the product design and development. That got me excited about what Hippocratic AI is doing,” Butler said in an interview.
A member of the Texas Medical Reserve Corps, Butler designed an AI agent focused on addressing extreme heat wave preparation.
“This use case marketplace is checking off every single box of how you build trust and build a better tool,” Butler said.
AI agents built with safety as a priority can significantly extend the reach of providers, Dulaney noted.
“If you look at the use cases that are being created that are available [in Hippocratic’s app store], you'll see a pattern of things likely not being done. For the maternal health space, there are 3.6 million births per year just in the United States, and that equates to 260 per minute. There is absolutely no way that we as a healthcare space, in the outpatient settings, can reach out, check in and properly assess all of those moms and families,” she said.
“AI should be thought about as an adjunct, a tool to improve what we're already doing,” she added.
Hippocratic AI's approach lets clinicians drive the development of AI tools, the nurses said.
"It's is a tool that people who have deep clinical expertise and practical wisdom can go in and have a tool that is set up that is very template-driven so that you can have a low level of entry. I think that is a very big game changer. What this platform does, which I haven't seen done elsewhere, is that it's enablement," Butler said.
Hippocratic uses a phased approach for the clinician-generated AI agents, the company said. Only licensed clinicians are permitted to participate in the program. All licensure information is verified before the creation of any AI agent. Clinicians build and test their agents before submitting them for publication. Hippocratic AI staff will also perform an initial round of testing.
Before being implemented in patient care, the agent undergoes further evaluations and safety assessments by Hippocratic’s network of clinicians—over 6,000 nurses and 300 doctors. Once the agent passes all safety tests, it is officially certified and ready for deployment.