Healthcare automation company Olive announced today the closing of a $400 million investment round led by Vista Equity Partners. The new capital boosts Olive’s valuation to $4 billion, the company said.

The Base10 Advancement Initiative also participated in the funding round, which helped create the Olive Scholarship, a series of financial aid awards for America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Since its founding in 2012, Olive has raised a total of $902 million, of which $832 million has been secured since March 2020.

WHAT IT DOES

Described as an “AI workforce,” Olive automates a range of tedious, high volume administrative tasks for healthcare organizations. It can be deployed to handle prior authorizations, manage vendor contracts and oversee inventory.

The company’s latest service Olive Helps, a desktop application for healthcare workers that provides real-time assistance for day-to-day tasks, is now available as a free download to the public.

More than 900 hospitals across the country currently employ Olive’s AI tools, the company said.

"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," Sean Lane, CEO of Olive, said in a statement.

"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."

WHAT IT’S FOR

The new cash will be used to accelerate product development in order to reach new clients, Olive said in the announcement. It also plans to recruit new talent as the company looks to more than double its staff during the year.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

As healthcare continues on its digital revolution, AI is pegged as a powerful tool to ease overwhelmed workforces and improve repetitive yet error-prone tasks. But experts say that for AI to be truly transformative, developers need to make it trustworthy.

Other startups automating healthcare administration include Lumeon, which closed a $30 million Series D round last summer, and Innovaccer, which last year scored $70 million in Series C funding.