Hume AI has secured $3 million from Northwell Holdings, the New York-based healthcare system’s investment arm Northwell Healthto continue developing machine learning models that aim to understand speech and expression.
WHAT HE DOES
The startup builds natural language understanding tools that take text, audio, video, or images and attempt to capture meaning, as well as emotion and other expressions. According to the company, some of its tools are meant to note feelings like surprise, pain, or sarcasm, or capture vocal sounds like gasps, sighs, and laughter.
Hume AI plans to use the capital to refine these ML models for healthcare, including clinical research, patient screening, and accessibility technology.
“Technologies that leverage the latest scientific research to help us better understand not just what people say, but how they say it, have profound potential to benefit patients,” said Rich Mulry, CEO and chairman of Northwell Holdings, in a statement.
“We are already seeing growing demand for this technology in treatment, clinical research, telehealth applications and more. To promote the careful development of these potentially transformative technologies, we are delighted to launch our partnership with Hume AI through an investment that reflects our confidence in Dr. Alan Cowen and his revolutionary team.”
MARKET OVERVIEW
As doctors report increasing levels of burnout, some startups have pushed AI-backed tools to reduce their administrative work. Abridge, which offers a tool that records, transcribes and organizes information gleaned from conversations with patients, recently raised $12.5 million in Series A-1 funding.
Another voice assistant for doctors, Suki, announced that he had been recovered $55 million in Series C funding at the end of last year.
Meanwhile, Northwell has expanded its investments in AI. Last year, the health system in partnership with Aegis Ventures on a joint venture focused on using AI to solve quality, equity and cost issues in healthcare. Hume is also a holding company of Aegis Ventures.
In April, the startup studio and Northwell announced the launch of Ascertaina platform that aims to develop and commercialize AI companies in the field of health.
Northwell also recently announced a partnership with Google Cloud use cloud technology and AI to automate administrative workflows and identify patient risk factors for early intervention.