Israeli startup Kahun, which has developed AI-backed clinical reasoning tools for physicians, raised $8 million in seed funding.
The round was led by LocalGlobe, with participation from the European Innovation Council Fund as part of the EIC Accelerator program and the Founders Kitchen. The seed brings the company’s total raise to $13 million.
WHAT IT DOES
Kahun’s first product is a clinical assessment chatbot. It asks patients questions about their symptoms and background, using medical literature to rule out rare diseases and urgent problems. The tool then provides a summary for the physician, noting areas of potential concern that may need further evaluation.
The startup also has a partnership with the New England Journal of Medicine, where it gives illness scripts based on specific clinical presentations to be used in the journal’s NEJM Healer tool. The application is used to teach and assess clinical reasoning skills for medical students and residents.
“The technology behind our AI solution follows the same building blocks that trained physicians rely on,” Kahun CEO and cofounder Eitan Ron said in a statement. “By using peer-reviewed texts and trusted academic literature from every area of medicine, we built a digital medical advisor that is trained to think like a physician and relieves the burden they face by integrating tools that they can trust into their workflows.”
Kahun plans to use the seed capital to add new specialties beyond primary care and expand its go-to-market efforts with telehealth companies.
MARKET SNAPSHOT
Another company that aims to help providers sift through clinical information is Regard, formerly known as HealthTensor. The startup is developing a tool that uses AI to go through patient history, surface relevant information and suggest potential diagnoses. Regard recently raised $15.3 million in Series A funding.
Abridge, a medical documentation startup, recently raised $12.5 million in a Series A round. Its system records and transcribes conversations between providers and patients, then organizes the information it pulled from the visit.
Google has also been working on similar provider-facing tools. In early 2021, it rolled out Care Studio, which helps organize medical records so clinicians can more easily search for and access important data. The tech giant later added Conditions, an AI-backed tool that creates a summary of a patient’s medical needs, highlighting acute conditions and identifying missing information.
