Bunkerhill Health raises $55 million for hospital AI agents

Bunkerhill Health has raised $55 million in total funding as it tries to put AI agents into everyday hospital work, Fortune reported. The company’s pitch is that hospitals can use one platform to address operational bottlenecks and clinical screening tasks that often sit across separate systems.

Fortune reported that Bunkerhill recently completed a $25 million Series B round led by Khosla Ventures. Sequoia, Felicis, Optum Ventures and Y Combinator also joined the round, according to the report.

The startup was co-founded in 2019 by Nishith Khandwala and David Eng, who began working on the idea while they were Stanford computer science students, Fortune reported. Their early project focused on using AI to read existing radiology scans for signs of heart disease and heart attack risk.

Khandwala, now Bunkerhill’s chief executive, told Fortune that the work gained personal urgency after his father had a heart attack in 2020. He said a cardiologist later told the family that an earlier scan had shown elevated heart disease risk, raising the possibility that the condition could have been identified sooner.

Fortune reported that Bunkerhill’s name comes from a short-lived CBS medical drama from the 2010s whose premise centered on faster change in medicine. The company now sells Carebricks, a platform that includes AI agents for hospital operations as well as clinical algorithms.

According to Fortune, Bunkerhill works with 15 health systems, including Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Ballad Health, Intermountain Health, Sentara Health, Endeavor Health and The University of Texas Medical Branch Health. The platform includes operational agents and nine FDA-cleared clinical AI algorithms, the report said.

Those clinical tools include an algorithm aimed at early detection of silent heart valve disease and another that evaluates osteoporosis risk, according to Fortune. On the operations side, the company says hospitals bring it problems such as delays, missed follow-ups and paperwork queues rather than adopting a fixed menu of uses.

Vinod Khosla, whose firm led the new round, told Fortune that hospitals have become more willing to adopt AI than they were to adopt earlier generations of software. He said AI has become a priority topic for hospital systems, in contrast with older software that many providers viewed as burdensome.

UTMB has deployed 22 Bunkerhill agents, Fortune reported. Dr. Peter McCaffrey, UTMB’s chief AI officer, told Fortune that AI has a valid role in health care while the relationship between physicians and patients must remain protected.

Sequoia partner Alfred Lin, who led Bunkerhill’s $6.5 million seed round in 2023, told Fortune that a crowded field of health care AI startups can help produce competition and better companies over time. Lin also said health care, like several industries where Sequoia has backed large companies, presents regulatory barriers but also room to improve outcomes.

Khandwala told Fortune that hospitals should not have to contract with many vendors to solve many different problems. He argued that Bunkerhill’s approach is broader than startups built around a single narrow administrative task.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.