Seattle-based Outbound AI, a company offering AI-powered virtual agents that perform administrative tasks, announced it scored $16 million in seed funding. 

Madrona Venture Group and SpringRock Ventures co-led the round, with participation from Ascend, Pack Ventures, Epic Ventures, Tacoma Venture Fund, Locke Capital and KCRise Fund. 

WHAT IT DOES

Outbound AI is a conversational AI tool for healthcare with 24/7 virtual agents that focus on the revenue cycle, including eligibility and benefits verification, claims status, and prior authorization. 

"We'll use the funds to accelerate our sales and marketing efforts around current back-end revenue cycle use cases and to help us evaluate several new use cases for other administrative work areas. We'll also use the funds to launch new programs with new partners," Stead Burwell, founder and CEO of Outbound AI, told MobiHealthNews in an email. 

MARKET SNAPSHOT

The health tech startup is backed by Madrona Venture Group's managing director, Tim Porter, and SpringRock Ventures' Kirsten Morbeck, who previously invested in conversational AI startup Saykara, which focused on ambient scribing for physicians. 

Saykara was acquired by Nuance Communications, which Microsoft subsequently acquired. 

Another conversational AI platform is Hyro. It offers a call center for providers that allows for automated conversations with their patients via conversational AI, and for real-time analytics with insights from patient interactions. Hyro also has a GPT-powered assistant, dubbed Spot, that offers explainability around AI outputs.

In May, the company announced it raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Macquarie Capital, bringing its total raise to $35 million.