More money is coming to AI healthcare: Gventus raises $105 million at a valuation of more than $400 million

Healthcare is proving to be one of the more lucrative fields when it comes to building AI solutions to accelerate how work is done across clinical, research and administrative operations. Today comes one of the latest examples of how this plays out in terms of venture funding. Gwentusa startup that builds AI-powered tools to automate work across a range of healthcare scenarios, including surgeries, hospital discharges and inpatient/outpatient visits — has raised a $105 million Series D round.

The funding, which includes $85 million in equity and $20 million in discretionary debt, will be used to develop more “AI teammates” for use in broader use cases beyond the stationary apps that helped Gventus make its name. he said.

“If we want to put the pedal to the metal, debt exists going forward,” CEO and co-founder Mudit Garg said in an interview. “We didn’t need equity or debt to be honest, but it was an opportunity.”

KKR is leading the financing, with previous backer Bessemer Venture Partners also participating. The round includes a number of prominent strategic investors who are customers of Gventus: Northwestern Medicine, HonorHealth and Allina Health. The company’s value has not been disclosed, but we understand from sources that it is more than $400 million.

Importantly, the fundraising highlights the interest that healthcare AI is currently attracting among investors. Just in the last few days, Cera $150 million in UK funding announced; Hippocratic raised $141 million; and Innovative collected 275 million dollars.

It also marks Gwentus’ own progression. This latest Series D is bigger than all of the startup’s previous rounds PitchBook He noted that Gventus had raised about $95 million before this round. His latest valuation was around $200 million in 2022.

Gventus has quadrupled its customer base since then, Garg said, and is on track to net 120% retention; and its core business has tripled. It wouldn’t disclose revenue figures or any other specific numbers, but he added that it’s “very close to breaking even.” It’s a detail that’s become more important in recent years as startups look for more sustainable business models, given that the IPO window remains relatively small but investors are still looking for returns.

AI scribes and other types of AI assistants are now relatively commonplace in the healthcare market, so much so that some AI healthcare companies may be trying to break away from that image to differentiate themselves.

“We’re not an AI writing company,” Garg said. “We have the opportunity to listen, but the AI ​​writer is a relatively commoditized space, and we focus on the operational area where the big pain point is.”

Garg himself has a background in engineering and an MBA, both from Stanford, and he was first introduced to the potential of using automation to help healthcare while working on a hospital project at McKinsey. Gventus itself has been operating for more than 12 years application of machine learning and other automation technologies to make clinicians and other medical professionals more efficient and later expand into areas of development pharmacy operations.

More recently, the development of generative artificial intelligence has brought it closer to creating solutions that are more responsive to what clinicians do in real-time.

Referring to the administrative work that’s part of clinical work these days, he says, “where you think of the closing teams doing ‘under license tasks,'” “machine learning has been in that space for twelve years now.” According to him, generative AI, AI tools are helping clinicians to do this. It has helped bring more unstructured data into the mix to improve how it can be used to help admins do more of their work, from “sending email and faxing (What the author of the AI ​​can do) takes the burden off the user.”

Next year will see more activity in AI healthcare in terms of M&A, both to raise funds for the most promising companies and to consolidate the field.

“Gventus is at the intersection of topics that KKR has spent a lot of time evaluating across both our Technology and Healthcare teams,” Jake Heller, partner and Americas head of technology development at KKR, told TechCrunch.

“The company is at a key growth point, especially in this era when healthcare systems are increasingly embracing technology to improve efficiency. The company’s technology significantly eases care orchestration and administrative burdens for physicians and healthcare providers, allowing providers to focus on providing the best patient care.