Hippocratic Health, a healthcare AI business, raised $50 million in a larger-than-usual seed fundraising round, indicating investor interest in AI models for specific industries.
Since entrepreneur Munjal Shah created Hippocratic earlier this year, Silicon Valley VC firms General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) co-led the round to support hiring and training massive language models.
Large language models are AI systems that summarize and generate content from massive data sets. Since ChatGPT, an OpenAI-based chatbot, went viral, they became famous.
Large language models (foundation models) can write essays and generate codes. However, Hippocratic Health intends to stand out in healthcare-specific use cases by training its model with profound medical knowledge and having healthcare personnel provide human feedback.
Hospitals need nurses and are actively seeking solutions. “We want to build the safest language model for healthcare,” said Shah, who launched the insurance firm Health IQ.
Shah said Hippocratic would focus on non-diagnostic duties and utilize pleasant bedside manners.
General Catalyst, which incubated Hippocratic, said its healthcare provider alliances would help the firm train and implement its platform.
“It made sense to help create a platform focused on the industry and built in collaboration with the industry, so it’s a trusted platform,” said General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja. A16z called it one of its largest healthcare seed checks.
“We’re only comfortable making a bet given that they’re being so rigorous about the safety, compliance, and privacy aspects of the system they’re building, which takes more money,” said fund partner Julie Yoo.