Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight the early-stage bets on the future of tech.
This week: an $11M Series A for a startup taking a safety-first approach to AI in healthcare. Amigo AI is building patient-facing agents, but with a training model that looks a lot more like medical school than traditional AI deployment.
Amigo AI has raised an $11M Series A led by Madrona, with participation from Optum Ventures, to expand its platform for training and deploying clinical AI agents.
The New York-based company builds AI agents that interact directly with patients across clinical workflows including intake and triage, personalized care navigation, and always-on patient support. The goal is to help healthcare organizations handle high-value clinical tasks while extending the reach of existing care teams.
Safety sits at the center of the platform. Before interacting with real patients, every agent goes through what the company calls a “digital residency,” training across millions of simulated scenarios tailored to each healthcare organization’s patient population. Those simulations intentionally stress-test agents with adversarial cases and edge scenarios until they reach a 100% safety pass rate.
That approach appears to be gaining traction. In the past six months alone, Amigo agents have completed more than three million patient encounters globally with zero safety incidents. Customers include Eucalyptus, Diverge Health, and The Care Clinic.
Founder and CEO Ali Khokhar previously worked at Upwork Labs building AI-native products and earlier in his career was on Google’s Ads and consumer growth teams. His motivation for tackling healthcare is personal, shaped by losing his mother to breast cancer when he was 14.
“AI is transforming every industry it touches, but healthcare has a higher bar,” Khokhar said. “There’s no room for errors or hallucinations, and definitely no second chances with patient lives. We asked ourselves how to make AI safe enough to deliver care. The answer was obvious. Clinical agents need to be trained the same way we train doctors.”
The company has now raised $17M in total funding and recently brought on Dr. Jay Shah, Chief of the Medical Staff at Stanford Health Care, as Chief Medical Advisor. If AI is going to operate on the clinical front lines, Amigo is making the case that it needs clinical-grade training first.
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This article was drafted with the help of generative AI using company-submitted details, then manually edited and carefully reviewed by a human editor before publication.
