A leader in AI-enabled healthcare support, BirchAI has announced that it closed a $3.1 million seed round to improve healthcare customer support through its edge AI-powered platform. AI-focused venture capital firm Radical Ventures led the round.
Automating Healthcare Customer Support
BirchAI leverages natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to automate the different aspects of healthcare customer support, such as the summarization, classification, and analysis of customer calls.
The company is a spinout from the leading AI-research organization Allen Institute for AI (AI2), which participated in the funding round alongside Flare Capital Partners and WRF Capital.
BirchAI is using state-of-the-art AI to address some of the many challenges in healthcare. The sector heavily relies on phone-based customer support teams staffed by clinically trained employees, but many of the individuals holding these roles are aging out of them. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it even more difficult to find qualified staff for medical device, pharmaceutical, and health insurance sub-sectors.
Through the use of their AI, BirchAI is automating after-call work for big enterprises while also collecting data from the calls to exact valuable customer insights.
Founded by Kevin Terrel, Sumant Kawale, and Yinhan Liu in 2020, BirchAI has assembled a team that previously collaborated on such issues. Before BirchAI, Liu held a top researcher position at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), and she was the lead author of some of the company’s work in NLP, such as the RoBERTa and BART papers. BirchAI leverages all of this to combine cutting-edge AI, healthcare, and enterprise AI deployment expertise to come up with new AI solutions.
Rob Toews is a Radical Ventures Partner who is now on the BirchAI board.
“The BirchAI team brings extraordinary technological depth and industry experience to tackling a very real problem facing the healthcare industry,” said Toews. “The BirchAI NLP platform goes beyond delivering cost savings and efficiencies. AI technology of this nature also unlocks insights that can fuel strategic product and business decisions for its customers.”
“Many calls in the healthcare industry are complex, lengthy, and costly, due to significant documentation requirements,” said Terrell. “Our initial focus is on complex calls, which generate over $10 billion in annual costs to the healthcare system. With BirchAI, companies will make it easier for their employees to document and analyze calls. Our platform lowers costs and improves the quality of the customer and employee experiences.”
Goals for New Funding
The company will use the additional funding to accelerate the team’s growth, address its customer backlog, and advance the AI platform. It collaborates with various Fortune 500 companies to develop these solutions and is working on growing its client base in the pharmaceutical sector.
“BirchAI’s intelligent automation platform transforms and digitizes some of the most complex and manual call-based workflows in healthcare, enabling customer support teams to provide higher-quality patient care guided by new clinical insight, while also reducing the cost of this care,” said Parth Desai of Flare Capital Partners. “Flare Capital is excited to support the BirchAI team on their mission.”
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