Curai Health, an AI-powered virtual care startup offering chat-based primary care services, announced a $27.5 million Series B funding round led by Morningside Ventures.
As part of the investment, Stephen Bruso from Morningside Ventures will join the company’s board.
The round, which was joined by existing investors General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures, brings the company’s total raised to almost $57 million.
The Curai Health AI system works as part of the care team, making suggestions, and automating more low-value tasks. According to the company, the AI system also will listen and learn from each patient encounter, ensuring it gains a greater understanding of medical language, symptomatology, and condition diagnosis – while also delivering increasingly high-quality patient care.
Previously available only direct-to-consumer, Curai Health has now expanded its telehealth services to support enterprise partnerships, including payers, employers, and public-sector organizations. Through the partnership, Curai Health aims to provide affordable primary care options for everyone, especially those people who sometimes struggle with care costs, like hourly employees, gig workers, and high-deductible health plans, the company said.
To date, the Curai Health platform has facilitated more than 350,000 patient visits, achieving nearly a 90% diagnosis accuracy rate, the company said.
Currently available in California, Curai Health will use the funding to continue innovating its technology and expand its services and footprint more broadly.
“Primary care should be just that – primary – to every single person, but without drastic innovation, the current system will only create more scarcity, higher costs, and a sicker population,” said Neal Khosla, co-founder and CEO of Curai Health.
“AI has the power to scale the care provided by a finite number of physicians so that it can meet the demands of a global population. We have dedicated countless hours to in-depth clinical and technical R&D to ensure our system gets smarter, more efficient, and increasingly cost-effective after every patient encounter. We are not interested in the 10- to 205 cost savings that most virtual care platforms aspire to deliver. We’re working toward ten and, eventually 100x, care-delivery cost reductions.”
Telemedicine companies raised $3.3 billion in the first nine months of 2020, according to the latest Mercom digital health funding report. Recently, CityBlock Health, which offers virtual care services for lower-income communities in the U.S., completed a $160 million Series C funding round at a valuation of over $1 billion.
