Hyro, the leader in plug-and-play conversational artificial intelligence (AI), today announced that it has finalized a $20 million Series B funding round led by Macquarie Capital, with participation from new investors Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Black Opal Ventures, and K20, as well as existing investors Hanaco Ventures, Spero Ventures, and Mindset Ventures—bringing the company’s total funding to $35 million. With this capital raise, Hyro will continue to meet the healthcare sector’s critical demand for conversational AI and automation, enabling large organizations to streamline access to digital services for their patients and staff while drastically improving operational efficiencies.
Hyro plans to hire top talent across all departments as it continues to build out its no-code platform for AI-powered call center, web, and mobile solutions, while also expanding strategic partnerships, integrations and use cases across key industries where it is already experiencing strong traction. Hyro has grown annual recurring revenue by over 100% year over year since launching in 2020, delivering stellar conversational experiences to over 30 million enterprise consumers resulting in tens of millions in operational savings. Hyro anticipates that the funding round, coupled with the surge in popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and other large language model (LLM) applications, will catalyze another fiscal year of doubled growth in these categories.
With 47% of the current US-based workforce in healthcare planning to exit the industry by 2025, Hyro is in pole position to capitalize on soaring demand for AI and natural language understanding (NLU) solutions. As digital expectations for health services continue to rise, health systems will need to compete for patient acquisition and satisfaction with a depleted staff, leaving Hyro’s AI-powered communications as a natural bridge for that growing labor gap.
“In an age of generative AI, labor shortages and economic struggle, healthcare organizations will look to eliminate low-level tasks to further drive efficiency,” said Israel Krush, CEO and Co-Founder of Hyro. “Automation is no longer simply nice to have–we’re poised to capture unprecedented demand for AI assistants as health systems continue trusting us to scale interactions surrounding critical workflows. The x-factor in this market will be the solutions provider that most responsibly and effectively blends key components of conversational AI together, including emerging technologies such as large language models, and we’re best positioned to accomplish that here at Hyro.”
Named a 2022 Gartner Cool Vendor for its unique natural language processing (NLP) and knowledge graph technologies, Hyro specializes in plug-and-play chat and voice interfaces that resolve up to 85% of routine tasks which would otherwise strain already overloaded healthcare organizations. Unlike intent-based solutions built through machine learning (ML), Hyro requires zero training data and eliminates client-side maintenance efforts, updating information in real time as content changes. AI assistants easily layer on top of existing omnichannel workflows to help centralize communications, improve access to services and care, and reduce operational costs. The skills automated by Hyro, including patient registration, routing, scheduling, IT helpdesk ticketing, frequently-asked-questions, and prescription refills, constitute roughly 60-70% of all inbound calls and messages and include inquiries from both patient and staff populations.
Beyond automating interactions, the key differentiator for Hyro is Conversational Intelligence. Distinguished from typical conversational AI solutions, including those based on LLMs, Hyro’s analytics dashboard includes “voice of the consumer” performance metrics, popular trends and explainability surrounding AI outputs, promoting full visibility as well as a constant feedback loop for organizations to further optimize their data.
Widely adopted across the provider segment, with clients like Mercy Health, Baptist Health and Intermountain Healthcare, Hyro is well positioned for significantly increased market share as enterprises continue to prioritize efficiency and proven ROI through automation. Hyro has recently released Spot™, a GPT-powered assistant capable of instantly generating answers to FAQs and search queries using customized enterprise data, all while maintaining explainability. With the ability to harness the power of LLMs without sacrificing security and control, Spot™ is already generating high demand as health systems selectively seek out generative AI implementation partners with a strong track record. Spot™ is already deployed in three large healthcare organizations.
“Consumers increasingly expect to communicate with companies via voice 24/7 and in a way that genuinely reflects human behavior,” said Dan Phillips, Executive Director at Macquarie Capital’s venture group who joins Hyro’s board as a director. “Hyro has been at the forefront of this technology and its operation in regulated environments like healthcare. With the advent of large language models, we believe these businesses will thrive as expectations and reality meet. Macquarie Capital is thrilled to partner with Hyro on its exciting journey.”
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