Qventus, an operational AI company that specializes in reducing inefficiency in care delivery, raised a $105 million series D "mega-round" led by global investment firm KKR, the company announced Monday.
Bessemer Venture Partners, a previous investor, also participated in the round. Qventus gained new strategic investors, including Northwestern Medicine, HonorHealth and Allina Health. The Series D catapults Qventus’ lifetime funding from $95 million to $200 million.
Mudit Garg, CEO of Qventus, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview that the company was not seeking to raise capital, but the interest of KKR spurred the round. He also said the funding is a reflection of the excitement and opportunity that lies in its operational AI solution.
KKR is a global investment firm that invests in private equity, private credit, infrastructure and real estate with a half-trillion-dollar fund. Qventus benefitted from its tech growth fund, which helps accelerate proven tech companies to reach new heights.
“KKR reached out and felt really excited about the vision of sort of getting these AI operational systems across the care continuum, the work we have done for the last decade in building the platform,” Garg said. “It felt like a really good opportunity to take additional support and capital and to double down on that vision."
Garg said KKR has a proven ability to scale businesses, and he was attracted to its expertise in tech growth and healthcare.
Qventus developed technology that automates care operations across a variety of care delivery settings, including in the operating room and inpatient settings. Its platform leverages generative AI, machine learning and behavioral science to predict operational bottlenecks and recommend remedies.
The inpatient solution increases efficiency of the patient discharge process, which is often mired in preventable hold-ups and lack of team coordination. Its AI operational assistant can call other healthcare institutions to collect necessary information before a patient goes into surgery, which is normally collected through a fragmented process by front-line staff.
“There's a lot of excitement around the area of, how do you take care operations – something that historically has taken a lot of work from frontline staff, from patients, from families and others, to navigate this complex healthcare system. How can we both make it more intelligent and more automated?” Garg said.
Since its series C round in 2022, Garg said that interest in Qventus’ products has skyrocketed. The use of its perioperative solution, which helps schedule time in the operating room around the dynamic schedule of surgeons, grew by 10x.
Qventus released the third generation of its inpatient solution in July, which was rolled out with OhioHealth. In the last year, the inpatient solution eliminated over 36,000 excess days for its health system partners and saved millions of dollars, according to the company.
The company also added an AI operational assistant in August, which it touts as being first-to-market. Garg said the AI operational assistant is vastly more resonant now than its surgical growth solution has been over the past two years.
“That has been a whole degree of resonance that I have never seen [sic] in the last 10 to 12 years,” Garg said.
Garg attributes the company's recent momentum to its foundation of understanding healthcare workflow and working on AI integration for the last decade. Garg cited Qventus’ deep integration with electronic health record vendors which has allowed the solution to be effective for its customers.
The company’s recent success is also the reason that it wasn’t seeking to raise a new round of capital, but Garg said he couldn’t walk away from the opportunity. “I saw the opportunity of really maximizing the market opportunity ahead of us with a great partner like KKR, and jumped on top of it,” Garg said.
Garg continued: “There's a tremendous amount of excitement and demand from our customers to go further across the care journey of the patient, to do the same kind of care operations automation that we're doing, but do it more broadly, across the continuum as well. We're going to use the capital to invest and invest deeper into all of those areas.”
The company also plans to invest heavily in its workforce, both to expand its technical capabilities and management.
“Built on a solid foundation, Qventus has navigated the evolving care landscape and emerged resilient, thanks to its sophisticated technology and proprietary data engine built over the last decade,” Jake Heller, Partner and Head of Tech Growth Equity, Americas at KKR said in a statement. “We believe Qventus is well-positioned to be a market leader in supporting care delivery at the provider level and redefining the future of health care by supporting hospital systems in operating more efficiently so they can focus on what really matters: quality care for patients.”