New Growth Capital will help Expand Hyro’s Platform, Featuring both Conversational and Generative AI, across Key Channels in Healthcare and other Regulated Industries
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 Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Black Opal Ventures, and existing and new investors, 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 reducing organizational inefficiencies.
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 up to 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 artificial intelligence and natural language understanding (NLU) solutions to ensure preparedness for further labor shortages. 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 a compounded age of AI, labor shortages and economic struggle, enterprises will look to eliminate low-level tasks to further drive efficiency,” said Israel Krush, Co-Founder and CEO at Hyro. “Automation is no longer simply nice to have–we’re poised to capture unprecedented demand for AI assistants as health systems continue to trust 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 health systems. AI assistants easily layer on top of existing omnichannel workflows to help centralize communications, improve access to services and care, and ensure reduced costs for a more productive workforce and profitable enterprise. The skills automated by Hyro, including patient registration, routing, scheduling, FAQs, IT helpdesk ticketing, and prescription refills, constitute roughly 60-70% of inbound calls and messages into health systems and include inquiries from both patient and staff populations.
Beyond conducting conversations and carrying out tasks, the key differentiator for Hyro is conversational intelligence. Unlike 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 content and datasets.
Already 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 and client acquisition as enterprises seek to automate processes and messaging across their most valuable channels. Hyro has recently released Spot™, a GPT-powered assistant capable of instantly generating answers to frequently-asked-questions and search queries using customized enterprise data, all while maintaining explainability. With the ability to embed the power of LLMs without sacrificing security and control, Hyro expects Spot™ to continue to generate demand quickly as health systems selectively seek out generative AI implementation partners with a strong track record. Spot™ is already deployed in three enterprise health systems.
“Consumers increasingly expect to communicate with companies via voice 24/7 and in a way that genuinely reflects human behavior” said Dan Philips, 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.”
About Hyro
Hyro, the #1 Adaptive Communications Platform, enables enterprises to automate workflows and conversations across their most valuable platforms, services and channels—including call centers, websites, SMS, mobile apps and more. Top-performing organizations trust Hyro’s plug-and-play approach, including an award-winning natural language engine, to help them recapture time and investment lost to building and maintaining chat and voice solutions. With Conversational Intelligence, Hyro delivers omnichannel analytics, including engagement metrics, trending topics and knowledge gaps, that offer industry-leading explainability, control and optimization. Headquartered in New York, Hyro delights clients like Intermountain Healthcare, Baptist Health, and Novant Health with AI assistants that are 60x faster to deploy, easy to maintain and simple to scale—conserving vital resources while generating better conversations, more conversions, and revenue-driving insights. Hyro was founded in 2018 by Israel Krush and Rom Cohen. Learn more at hyro.ai
Originally announced May 31st, 2023
