Northwell invests $3M in Hume AI to develop speech, expression understanding for healthcare

Hume AI scored $3 million from Northwell Holdings, the funding arm of New York-based well being system Northwell Well being, to proceed creating machine studying fashions that goal to grasp speech and expression.

WHAT IT DOES

The startup builds pure language-understanding instruments that take textual content, audio, video or photos and take a look at to seize which means, in addition to emotion and different expressions. In line with the corporate, a few of its instruments are supposed to notice emotions like shock, ache or sarcasm, or to seize vocal appears like gasps, sighs and laughs. 

Hume AI plans to make use of the capital to refine these ML fashions for healthcare, together with medical analysis, affected person screening and accessibility expertise.

“Applied sciences that draw upon the most recent scientific analysis to assist us higher perceive not simply what individuals say, however how they are saying it, have profound potential to profit sufferers,” Wealthy Mulry, CEO and president of Northwell Holdings, stated in an announcement.

“We already see rising demand for this expertise in therapy, medical analysis, telehealth functions and extra. To advertise the cautious growth of those doubtlessly transformative applied sciences, we’re excited to launch our partnership with Hume AI by an funding that displays our confidence in Dr. Alan Cowen and his groundbreaking staff.”

MARKET SNAPSHOT

As physicians report more and more excessive ranges of burnout, some startups have pushed AI-backed instruments to chop down on their administrative work. Abridge, which provides a software that data, transcribes and organizes data gleaned from conversations with sufferers, lately raised $12.5 million in Sequence A-1 funding.

One other voice assistant for docs, Suki, introduced it scooped up $55 million in Sequence C funding late final yr.

In the meantime, Northwell has been increasing its investments in AI. Final yr, the well being system partnered with Aegis Ventures on a three way partnership centered on using AI to deal with high quality, fairness and value issues in healthcare. Hume can be a portfolio firm of Aegis Ventures. 

In April the startup studio and Northwell introduced the launch of Verify, a platform that goals to develop and commercialize healthcare AI corporations.

Northwell additionally lately introduced a partnership with Google Cloud to make use of cloud expertise and AI to automate administrative workflows and determine affected person danger components for early intervention.