A week after one of the most prominent voices in the field of artificial intelligence (ai) made an ominous prediction, a new startup is making progress that backs up the claim.
In a recent blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that 2025 would be the year ai agents would join the workforce. In the future he You see, ai will significantly change the way companies do business; Altman frames this as an overall positive development.
Now, one ai startup is taking important steps to help realize its potential. OpenAI is not the company, but it seems to have the potential to change things in certain aspects of the healthcare industry.
This comes at a time when the use of ai in this sector may raise some red flags. But the company is helping to usher in a future in which this new technology will play a critical role in healthcare.
ai agents may come to a hospital near you
Would you trust non-human agents to help you with your hospital visits? That question has likely been on many people's minds recently, as emerging ai capabilities have led to advances in many different industries, including healthcare.
One member of that group is Hippocratic ai, a health tech startup founded in 2022. The company is working to create ai agents (for example, sophisticated chatbots or digital assistants) that can help with non-patient-facing tasks. diagnosis, such as preparing appointments. , preoperative procedures and chronic care management.
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Hippocratic ai recently achieved a key milestone when it successfully closed its Series B funding round just nine months after its Series A. Led by Kleiner Perkins, the large venture capital (VC) firm that has backed companies like Google. (GOOGLE) amazon (AMZN) The recent funding round earned the startup $141 million, bringing it to a valuation of $1.64 billion.
Over the past year, the startup received a $17 million investment from Nvidia. (NVDA) after being backed by leading investors General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. Hippocratic issued a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250109643850/en/Hippocratic-ai-Completes-141MM-Series-B-Financing-Round-Led-by-Kleiner-Perkins-Valuing-the-Company-at-1.64B”>statement on the recent success of Serie B, stating:
“The company took the opportunity to acquire additional capital to further its mission of delivering healthcare abundance and improving patient outcomes around the world through its safety-focused Polaris constellation LLM architecture. The new capital will be used to expand the company into more verticals (pharma, payers) and new markets (EMEA, Southeast Asia, Latam).”
TechCrunch reports that Hippocratic ai is focused on helping address the current staffing shortage in the healthcare industry by deploying ai agents to perform what it describes as simple tasks, thus freeing up human workers to do other things.
However, this news comes at a time when the use of ai in certain areas of healthcare is under scrutiny. Since the murder of former UnitedHealthcare (UNH) CEO Brian Thompson In December 2024, health insurance providers came under fire for using artificial intelligence to review health insurance claims, many of which were denied.
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Despite this, Silicon Valley is clearly confident that companies like Hippocratic have plenty of room to run as their technology continues to be used in the industry. According TechCrunchThe startup has “signed contracts with 23 health systems and insurers” through 2024, indicating that interest remains quite high.
What does ai mean for healthcare?
One of the venture capitalists who helped fuel Hippocratic ai's recent funding round provided context on the market, which he certainly sees as having high growth potential.
“The total addressable market for using generative ai to solve the healthcare workforce shortage is likely 10 times the size of the healthcare software market alone, and we are excited to support the Hippocratic ai team on their journey” , says Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins.
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He also cites the startup's focus on patient safety and “unique constellation LLM architecture” as primary reasons for the company's interest in its work and decision to invest in it.
Hippocratic ai reports that its ai agents have successfully completed hundreds of thousands of patient calls. “Patient response has been excellent, giving interactions with its GenAI agents an average rating of 8.7 out of 10,” the company reports.
This suggests that patient sentiment toward ai medical agents may not be too negative, as the technology continues to spread throughout hospitals. In previous years, studies have found that most people do not trust the use of ai in healthcare settings and feel that more transparency is needed.
However, this trend is still new and it will be difficult to assess the impact of agents like Hippocratic ai on the broader industry until more data is released.
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