Hippocratic AI launches with $50M to build large language model for healthcare

Hippocratic AI, a generative AI company developing safety-focused large language models for healthcare, launched with $50 million in seed funding.

The funding round was co-led by General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. 

WHAT THEY DO

Hippocratic AI is building a large language model for healthcare, initially concentrating on non-diagnostic, patient-facing applications. The company is focusing on certification, ensuring proper bedside manner for patient well-being and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) through a panel of healthcare professionals.

The company said the aim is to reduce healthcare costs, expand access to care and increase the supply and availability of healthcare workers. 

The California-based company was founded by a team of hospital administrators, physicians, Medicare professionals, and AI researchers from Johns Hopkins, Nvidia, Washington University in St. Louis, El Camino Health, UPenn, Stanford and Google.

“The healthcare industry needs its own AI platform, one that is focused on empowering the workforce, reducing burnout, and improving patient safety and experiences with the healthcare system. We joined forces with the Hippocratic AI team, our health assurance ecosystem, and the a16z team to build this platform. Our goal is to fundamentally increase the supply and scalability of healthcare professionals. This is the key to achieving the health assurance vision: a more proactive, more affordable, and equitable system of care for all,” Hemant Taneja, CEO and managing director at General Catalyst, said in a statement. 

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Hippocratic AI’s cofounder and CEO, Munjal Shah, founded visual search engine Like.com, which Google acquired in 2010. Andreessen Horowitz also invested in Like.com. 

Shah has cofounded numerous other companies, including Health Equity Labs, which develops a FICO-type score for health, and Health IQ, an AI-enabled platform that reviews seniors’ health records to assist them in selecting a Medicare Advantage plan. 

Generative AI tools and large language models have made their way into healthcare. 

In April, Google announced that Med-PaLM 2, the tech giant’s medical large language model, would be available to select Google Cloud customers within weeks of its announcement to share feedback, explore use cases and for limited testing. 

Med-PaLM 2 is a generative AI technology that utilizes Google’s LLMs to answer medical questions. 

The use of GPT-4 within healthcare has also been heavily explored and debated, with some experts saying it is already making an impact in the clinical setting.