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AI-enabled healthcare workflow platform Health Universe has secured $6 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing its total raise to $9.5 million.
"Health Universe is an AI workflow orchestration platform for healthcare. We effectively provide academic medical centers and other healthcare organizations a secure, compliant, ONC-certified workspace to deploy agents," Dan Caron, founder and CEO of Health Universe, told MobiHealthNews.
The company retrieves medical records from the National Interoperability Network, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), through its partner-patient information exchange network Kno2 and connects those records to a secure workspace, then uses AI to create and deploy agents that run against the data.
"What that means is that we can take the highest priority use cases of an organization, and we can build and deploy agents quickly, sometimes in just a matter of days, that provide tons of value very, very quickly, using new tools like the foundation models that we all use, like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, or even custom, fine-tuned models as well," Caron said.
He said Health Universe is essentially a healthcare-specific, vertically integrated platform, similar to well-known AI platforms, but it is pulling in medical records and building bespoke agents to run on top of them.
"We're providing the governance, the observability, the trust and safety layer, the human-in-the-loop functionality, and all of the feature sets that are required for large health systems to operate in this sort of new AI world that we live in," Caron said.
He said the company also has partners using Health Universe to commercialize, including Duke Clinical Research Institute, which used the platform to set up a clinical trial, a process that typically takes 9 to 10 months. Caron touted the Health Universe platform as reducing Duke's process from 9 months to 7.5 days.
Health Universe will use the seed funding to enhance its marketing and sales footprint; deepen integrations with oncology and clinical research teams; expand its workforce, including hiring engineers and data scientists; and accelerate adoption of its AI agent infrastructure within academic medical centers, life sciences organizations and health systems.
"When I founded Health Universe, I wanted to build a company that was in AI, that was in healthcare, that could help patients all around the world, and that could attract the best talent, capital and partners, and would be something that I could wake up every day, and my team could wake up every day, and be really excited to work on," Caron said.
"All of those criteria resulted in Health Universe, because I realized that there was no platform where a doctor or clinician or even a patient could go, using their web browser, and run and launch a machine learning model right from the browser."
Caron said Health Universe will continue onboarding more researchers and machine learning engineers from the academic medical centers (AMCs) it works with to enable the distribution and the dissemination of machine learning and AI tools in healthcare.
"I want to live in a world where any clinician anywhere can run the latest and greatest breast cancer detection model, whether that model comes from Stanford or Harvard or Japan," Caron said. "We need to be able to disseminate this innovation much more quickly."
