Healthcare automation startup Olive raked in $400 million in fresh capital to build out its enterprise AI for hospitals.
The round, led by Vista Equity Partners, boosts the company’s valuation to $4 billion, it claims. Base10 Partners Advancement Initiative also participated in the round.
Since March 2020, the startup has raised $832 million in financing and a total of $902 million since the company’s founding in 2012.
The company pulled in $225 million in December at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Olive plans to use the cash infusion to further scale product development and expand its artificial intelligence capabilities.
Olive CEO Sean Lane and his team first deployed Olive in 2017 with the idea to tackle the high-volume, repetitive and manual tasks healthcare workers do every day but faster and more accurately. The company has been tackling issues like prior authorization through the acquisition of AI software provider Verata Health.
It also recently entered the operating room with the acquisition of Empiric Health, an AI-powered clinical analytics and service company that focuses on identifying unwarranted clinical variation—starting in surgery. Through that acquisition, Olive expanded its capabilities for supply chain and clinical analysis for surgeries.
Olive also is targeting the provider payments process with its Olive Assures product and has made its Olive Helps technology, what is describes as healthcare’s “superhuman sidekick,” available as a free download to the public. Olive Helps is a desktop platform that uses sensors to observe and understand the context of an employee’s work through the interactions they have with applications, webpages, keystrokes and highlighted text.
Olive’s enterprise AI is now in place at more than 900 hospitals in over 40 U.S. states, including more than 20 of the top 100 U.S. health systems.
The company aims to bring a humanized and empathetic approach to automation in healthcare. Olive executives describe “her” as an AI-powered digital employee.
“Olive is the leading force for rapid product development to better empower the humans in healthcare. She is being hired at health systems and insurance companies across the country at lightning speed,” Lane said. “Olive’s widespread adoption as mission-critical tech makes it clear that now is the time for the healthcare industry to pull into the lead position for enterprise AI adoption.”
Monti Saroya, co-head of Vista’s Flagship Fund and senior managing director, said the investment firm sees the potential for Olive’s AI capabilities to deliver “true disruption” to the healthcare industry through automating and optimizing workflows, improving interoperability and turning critical data into actionable insights.
The company also plans to use its new funding to recruit new hires as it rapidly scales its product, data and engineering talent and plans to more than double its number of employees. It launched a flexible workforce model called The Grid in May 2020 with about 230 employees in less than 20 states, and that has grown to 800 employees spread across 43 states.
