🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week: Hippocratic AI

✍️ Notes from the Editors

People call the present the “boom of AI.” But in a world of models like GPT-4, building an AI company can seem daunting. How can a startup stand out and compete?

Hippocratic AI shows us that the name of the game, like most industries, is in differentiation. A strong team focusing on building a product for an “edge case” (ironically, an “edge case” worth tens of billions of dollars) can spark the creation of a unicorn. It’s still early to say for sure whether Hippocratic AI is that unicorn. Then again, we’re in the business of early.

- Ethan and Arek 🦄

Safety-first AI for health care

Hippocratic AI is building the safest AI model for health care. This model, called Health General Intelligence, was created by a team of physicians and researchers using evidence-based healthcare data and is intended for patient-facing applications (like chatbots) and not for diagnosing illnesses. The model has been tested on over a hundred medical certifications, exceeding the scores of other commercial models like GPT-4.

🔗 Check it out: hippocraticai.com

💰 Business Model

Hippocratic AI is still in testing with select providers and physicians, but upon release, we anticipate it’ll be available to clients on a per-usage basis.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Raised total $65 million seed round from a16z and General Catalyst

• Outperformed GPT-4 on 105 out of 114 certifications testing medical knowledge, standard procedure, and bedside manner

👫 Founders

• Munjal Shah, CEO: Prev. Co-Founder & CEO @ Health IQ, Director of Product @ Google, Co-Founder @ CEO of Like.com (acquired by Google)

• Vishal Parikh, CPO: Prev. Co-Founder & CPO @ Health IQ

• Meenesh Bhimani, Chief Medical Officer: Prev. COO @ El Camino Health, MD @ Johns Hopkins

• Subho Mukherjee, Chief Science Officer: Prev. Principal Researcher @ Microsoft, ML @ Amazon, CS PhD @ Max Planck Institute

• Alex Miller, COO: Prev. Co-Founder & SVP Engineering/Sales @ Health IQ

• Saad Godil, CTO: Prev. Director of Applied Deep Learning Research @ NVIDIA

• Kim Parikh, SVP of Data & Content: Prev. VP of Strategy & Operations @ Health IQ

• Debajyoti Datta, Research Scientist: Prev. Healthcare ML PhD @ University of Virginia

• Paul Gamble, Clinical Scientist: Prev. Clinician Scientist @ Google, MD @ Washington University of St. Louis

💼 Opportunities

• Catch-all opening - per its site, Hippocratic doesn’t open standard job postings, rather it creates roles based on who applies

🔮 Our Analysis

We’ve had the opportunity to cover many AI companies in a wide range of industries. Take, for example, hospitality and fintech. We’ve also covered AI companies with general applications to multiple industries, such as Hume AI. Certain industries necessitate industry-specific AI solutions, and health care is one example of this. Hippocratic AI is building large language models for the health care space, and already has promising results to show. However, what makes it stand out is its focus on adopting the morals of its space, evident in its name, which comes from the Hippocratic Oath. The company has demonstrated its commitment to these values by working with professionals to vet its product and choosing to not release AI until it has been deemed safe by “a large number of these licensed professionals.”

Hippocratic AI’s stellar team comes from a number of places, with serial entrepreneur Munjal Shah leading the company as CEO. He, as well as three other founding team members, built Health IQ, a Medicare coverage navigator. While Hippocratic AI’s product is still not ready for commercial use, we believe the traction it has demonstrated thus far combined with its strong grounding in its values and proven founding team, has prescribed the company a dose of success.

📚 Further Reading

• Hippocratic is building a large language model for healthcare [TechCrunch]

• Investing in Hippocratic AI [Andreessen Horowitz]

• Hippocratic AI raises $15M and more digital health fundings [MobiHealthNews]

Written by the editors

⏪ Unicorner Rewind

Spotlighting cool updates from past covers.

Interested in learning more about industry-specific AI applications? The SpotClub podcast (co-hosted by Ethan from Unicorner) covered this and more in its latest episode with Luca Zambello, CEO of Jurny, which we just featured for the second time a few weeks ago. Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred listening platform.

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