Munjal Shah’s Hippocratic AI Raises $53 Million to Develop Healthcare-Focused LLMs
Hippocratic AI, a startup co-founded by Munjal Shah in 2023, recently announced the successful closure of a $53 million Series A funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $120 million and valuing it at an impressive $500 million. The round was led by Premji Invest and General Catalyst, with participation from SV Angel, Memorial Hermann Health System, and existing investors such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, and Universal Health Services.
Munjal Shah founded Hippocratic AI to develop artificial intelligence agents that can assist with low-risk, nondiagnostic, patient-facing tasks in healthcare. The company focuses on creating a “constellation” of large language models (LLMs) that leverage generative AI to provide services such as patient navigation, chronic care nursing, and dietitian advice. By addressing the global shortage of healthcare professionals, Munjal Shah aims to make medical care more accessible to a more significant number of patients than would be possible with human workers alone.
The company’s technology is built upon its Polaris architecture, a multiagent LLM constellation optimized for real-time healthcare conversation. This system combines a primary generative AI conversational agent with numerous specialist support agents; each fine-tuned for specific medical tasks. The AI agents are trained using evidence-based research, simulated conversations, and input from U.S.-licensed nurses and patient actors. This results in empathetic and knowledgeable AI that can engage in natural and supportive dialogue with patients.
Munjal Shah has emphasized the company’s commitment to safety, which is reflected in its name, derived from the physicians’ Hippocratic oath and its tagline, “Do No Harm.” The company has implemented a rigorous, multiphase safety testing protocol, engaging with a broad network of healthcare systems and professionals to validate its AI agents. For Phase 3 of testing, the company’s criteria stipulate that 5,000 licensed nurses, 500 licensed physicians, and the enterprise’s health system collaborators must fulfill the testing requirements.
Hippocratic AI’s internal research has yielded promising results, with its AI agents outperforming human medical professionals and other LLMs in several nondiagnostic tasks. The company’s AI delivered correct medical advice 96.79% of the time, compared to 81.16% for human nurses alone. Instances of incorrect advice from the AI that resulted in no harm were 1.83%, minor harm was 1.32%, and severe harm was a negligible 0.06%. In contrast, human nurses provided incorrect advice, leading to no harm in 14.72% of cases and minor harm in 4.12% of cases, with no cases of severe harm.
As Munjal Shah and Hippocratic AI continue to develop their technology and collaborate with healthcare systems and professionals, the company’s focus on safety, strategic partnerships, and precise applications of generative AI in healthcare positions it to play a significant role in shaping the future of medical innovation. With the latest funding round valuing the company at $500 million, Munjal Shah’s Hippocratic AI is well-positioned to revolutionize healthcare by leveraging the power of LLMs to support healthcare professionals and improve patient care.
