Hippocratic AI adds $17M to its Series A funding, partners with NVIDIA

Hippocratic AI, the company building the first safety-focused Large Language Model (LLM) for healthc

Hippocratic AI is a company that has developed what it says is the industry’s first safety-focused Large Language Model (LLM) designed specifically for healthcare. This comes as 34% of dollars invested in digital health startups in the first half of 2024 went to companies leveraging artificial intelligence, while the global artificial intelligence in the healthcare market, which was valued at $16.3 billion in 2022, is expected to grow to reach $173.55 billion by 2029, a CAGR of 40.2%. 

Now the company had entered in a new strategic partnership, announcing a collaboration with NVIDIA on Friday, along with a new tranche of funding, adding $17 million its Series A round of funding. 

The new investment came from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, along with Greycroft and Leo Shapiro of 7Wire Ventures. This is combined with the $53 million that Hippocratic announced in March from Premji Invest and General Catalyst, with participation from SV Angel and Memorial Hermann Health System as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Health, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, and Universal Health Services. This latest funding brings its total raised to $137 million.

Hippocratic AI, which officially launched out of stealth last year, was founded by a group of physicians, hospital administrators, Medicare professionals, and artificial intelligence researchers from El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, UPenn, Google, and Nvidia.

The company is building a number of features that make its language model safer and tuned to the healthcare industry’s needs, including certifying its system on the US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), while also certifying it on 114 different healthcare certifications. It also built in voice capabilities through which the LLM can detect tone.

In addition, Hippocratic has also done Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) with healthcare professionals, which is what allowed OpenAI to make the leap from GPT3 to ChatGPT, though they did it with average consumers, not medical professionals.

In its collaboration with NVIDIA, Hippocratic AI says it's leveraging NVIDIA NIM microservices to scale its production platform in order to be able to deliver low-latency and long-context conversational capabilities.The collaboration includes several techniques tailored for real-time, long-context conversational AI. That includes prefix caching, speculative decoding, and prefill/decode disaggregation.

Hippocratic AI, powered by NVIDIA technologies, is also advancing medical domain specialization in LLMs through custom automated speech recognition (ASR) technology.

“NVIDIA is an ideal collaborator to help us achieve our vision of delivering healthcare abundance,” Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, said in a statement.

“Our deep technical collaboration has helped us to build an LLM with extremely low latency leading to more empathetic inference capabilities. Their venture capital arm’s investment in our company demonstrates our shared interest in harnessing the power of generative AI to revolutionize healthcare.”

(Image source: HippocraticAI.com)