Healthcare is proving to be one of the more lucrative industries for developing AI solutions that accelerate clinical, research and administrative operations. Now we have one of the latest examples of how this is reflected in fundraising. Qventus, a startup developing AI tools to automate tasks in a variety of healthcare scenarios — including surgeries, hospital discharges and inpatient and outpatient patient reviews — has raised $105 million in Series D funding.
The funding, which includes $85 million in equity and $20 million in option debt, will be used to develop additional “AI colleagues” to be used in a broader range of cases beyond the hospital treatment applications for which Qventus has become known, it said. company.
“Debt is available if we decide to accelerate development,” Mudit Garg, CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “To be honest, we didn’t need the capital or the debt, but this was an opportunity.”
KKR is leading this round, while previous investor Bessemer Venture Partners is also joining. The round also includes a number of prominent strategic investors who are also Qventus users: Northwestern Medicine, HonorHealth and Allina Health. The value of the company has not been officially announced, but sources indicate that it amounts to more than 400 million dollars.
Significantly, raising these funds highlights the interest that AI healthcare is currently attracting among investors. In the last few days, the British Cera collected 150 million dollars, Hippocratic 141 million, and Innovaccer as much as 275 million dollars.
It also points to the progress of Qventus. This latest Series D round of funding is larger than all of the startup’s previous rounds combined — according to PitchBook, Qventus raised about $95 million before this round. His last valuation, from 2022, was around $200 million.
Garg said Qventus has since quadrupled its user base, resulting in a net retention of 120%, while its core business has seen threefold growth. The company doesn’t disclose revenue or any other specific numbers, but Garg said the firm is “very close to breaking even.” That detail has become more important in recent years as startups look for more sustainable business models as the window for initial public offerings (IPOs) are still relatively small, while investors are looking for a return on their investment.
AI writers and other types of AI assistants have now become relatively common in the healthcare market, to the point that some companies in the field may even be trying to distance themselves from the label to differentiate themselves.
“We’re not an AI writing company,” Garg said. “We have the capacity to listen, but AI writers are a relatively commoditized market, and we’re focusing on the operations area where there’s a huge problem.”
Garg has an engineering background and an MBA, both from Stanford, and first encountered the potential of automation in healthcare while working on a hospital project at McKinsey. Qventus has been around for more than 12 years, and started by applying machine learning and other automation technologies to make doctors and other medical professionals more efficient. It later expanded into other areas of development, such as pharmaceutical operations.
Developments in generative artificial intelligence have recently brought the company closer to creating solutions that are more responsive to what clinicians are working on in real time.
“If you think about where care teams are doing ‘sub-license jobs,'” he said, referring to the administrative tasks that are an essential part of clinical work today, “machine learning has been in this space for 12 years.” Generative artificial intelligence, he added, helped incorporate more unstructured data into the process to improve the use of AI tools to perform more administrative tasks, such as “sending emails and faxes far beyond what AI writers can do,” thereby the burden on users is reduced.
In the coming year, we will likely see more activity in the healthcare AI space, both through fundraising for promising companies and through mergers and acquisitions to consolidate the market.
“Qventus sits at the intersection of themes that KKR has explored extensively across our technology and healthcare teams,” said Jake Heller, partner and head of technology growth for the Americas at KKR.
“The company is at a crucial time of growth, especially at a time when healthcare systems are increasingly adopting technology to increase efficiency. The company’s technology significantly alleviates care orchestration and administrative burdens for physicians and nursing staff, allowing providers to focus on delivering the best care to patients.”
The post More money is coming to AI healthcare: Qventus raises $105 million at a valuation of more than $400 million appeared first on ITNetwork.
Source: www.itnetwork.rs
