NY: hippocratic healtha startup building artificial intelligence models for the health care industry, has raised $50 million in a larger-than-usual seed foundation round, indicating strong investor interest in betting AI models for specific industries.
Silicon Valley venture firms General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) co-led the round, which funded the cost of hiring and training top language models since the entrepreneur Munjal Shah founded hippocratic at the beginning of this year.
Big language models are artificial intelligence systems that mine large amounts of data to summarize information and generate content. They have gained mainstream attention since ChatGPT, a model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI, went viral.
Also known as basic models, large language models can perform tasks from writing essays to generating code. hippocratic Health hopes its model will excel in specific healthcare use cases by training it with deep medical knowledge and having healthcare workers provide human feedback.
“Hospitals are actively looking for solutions that can help them, and they don’t have enough nurses. Our focus is to build the safest language model for healthcare,” said Shah, who previously founded insurance startup Health IQ.
Shah said Hippocratic will focus on non-diagnostic tasks, and his model will be able to meet criteria for certification in multiple areas of healthcare, as well as use reassuring bedside manners when communicating with patients.
General Catalyst, which incubated Hippocratic, says its existing partnerships with healthcare providers will help the startup train and implement its model.
“It made sense to help create a platform that is industry-focused and built in collaboration with the industry, so it’s a trusted platform,” said Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst. A16z said it is one of the biggest seed checks he has written in the health industry.
“We only feel comfortable making the bet given the fact that they are being so rigorous with the security, compliance and privacy aspects of the system they are building, which requires more money,” said Julie Yoo, a partner at the fund.
