Hippocratic AI, a firm developing a safety-focused Large Language Model (LLM) for healthcare, has raised an additional $17m to build generative artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare agents.

The investment was completed by NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, Greycroft, and Leo Shapiro of 7Wire Ventures.

The funding represents an add-on to Hippocratic AI’s recently closed extended Series A round.

The startup has raised a total of $137m. This includes $53m in Series A funding co-led by Premji Invest and General Catalyst, which was secured in March.

It also saw participation from SV Angel, Memorial Hermann Health System, and existing investors like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Bio + Health, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, and Universal Health Services (UHS).

The funding round values the company at $500m.

Hippocratic AI co-founder and CEO Munjal Shah said: “Our deep technical collaboration has helped us to build an LLM with extremely low latency leading to more empathetic inference capabilities.

“Their venture capital arm’s investment in our company demonstrates our shared interest in harnessing the power of generative AI to revolutionise healthcare.”

The company’s staffing marketplace allows health systems and payers to hire generative AI-powered agents for low-risk, non-diagnostic patient services.

It aims to alleviate the shortage of healthcare professionals like nurses, social workers, and nutritionists.

The platform currently features 19 agent roles, including pre-operative care, chronic care management, post-discharge support, nutrition counselling, and wellness coaching.

Hippocratic AI is collaborating with NVIDIA to drive technological advancements in healthcare.

The startup is using NVIDIA NIM microservices to enhance its production platform, ensuring low-latency and long-context conversational capabilities.

This partnership was launched at the NVIDIA GTC global AI conference in March.

Key techniques include prefix caching, speculative decoding, and prefill/decode disaggregation, all designed for real-time conversational AI.

Additionally, the healthcare technology firm is advancing medical domain specialisation in LLMs with custom automated speech recognition (ASR) technology, tailored for clinician-patient interactions.

NVIDIA healthcare vice president Kimberly Powell said: “Generative AI will expand the healthcare industry and its ability to serve the growing demands of patient care, and Hippocratic AI is putting the technology to work to increase access to healthcare.

“The company’s safety-focused approach uses advanced NVIDIA technologies to make personalised, real-time patient interactions more natural and capable, helping build trust among patients and clinicians alike.”