Cornell Tech Studio Startup Hyro Raises $45 Million to Scale Voice AI in Healthcare

By Carina Storrs

Hyro, a health tech startup founded at Cornell Tech that is tackling healthcare inefficiencies through voice AI agents, raised $45 million in a recent growth investment round and received several prestigious recognitions.

Hyro arose in 2018 when Israel Krush ’18 and Rom Cohen ’18 teamed up to develop a startup idea for the Cornell Tech Startup Studio course during the final semester of their MBA and master of engineering, respectively. At the time, Alexa and Google Home Speaker were just taking off but offered only basic functions such as playing a song and setting an alarm.

“We saw a future in which AI agents are going to be all around us, and the question was, how can organizations across the world adapt to this new technology?” says Krush, CEO and co-founder of Hyro.

Krush and Cohen credit the Startup Studio instructors and other Cornell Tech experts with imparting them the importance of focusing on the needs of a single industry. “The more we dug down into healthcare, the more we saw the opportunity to have a huge impact there,” said Cohen, COO and co-founder of Hyro. The pair began developing conversational AI agents that help patients access information about their primary care and enable healthcare systems to optimize their use of human agents in call centers.

Karan Girotra, the Charles H. Dyson Family Professor of Management at Cornell Tech, who co-led the Startup Studio course, saw Krush and Cohen open-mindedness about their startup idea as an asset. “They threw themselves into the program and took full advantage of everything that Cornell Tech offers, demonstrating that students don’t need to arrive at Cornell Tech committed to an idea,” said Girotra, who is also affiliated with the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

As for what they came up with, “Hyro was one of those ideas that really checked all the boxes,” Girotra says. He notes that Krush and Cohen drew from their deep-tech, healthcare, and business courses to come up with something that “felt like a science-fiction idea in 2018, well before the current wave of ChatGPT and other AI technologies.”

Toward the end of the course, Hyro was selected as one of the companies to be pitched to industry leaders and investors. Hyro caught the attention of Deborah Estrin, Associate Dean for Impact at Cornell Tech, who brought the idea to Curtis Cole, then CIO of Weill Cornell Medicine (now Weill Cornell’s inaugural vice president and chief global information officer). Their enthusiasm spawned Hyro’s first investor in Cornell Tech and first client in Weill Cornell.

Today, Hyro counts 45 large healthcare organizations as its clients, including Baptist Health System, Intermountain Health, and Bon Secours Mercy Health. It handles millions of conversations with their patients. Hyro AI agents chat with patients when they make a call or seek assistance through the patient portal or website for services including checking on or scheduling appointments, refilling prescriptions, and billing assistance.

In the rare case that an agent can’t complete the task, the agent hands the conversation off to a human. Although patients tend to say they prefer humans before they talk with a Hyro AI agent, they quickly warm up to the AI version because they realize they can get help much faster, Krush says.

In terms of clients, “they are looking at us as partners in how to adapt to this new AI world and become more efficient,” Krush says. The large healthcare organizations working with Hyro’s technology are saving millions of dollars a year by reducing their call center needs.

Hyro’s growth investment round of $45 million comes only 10 months after its previous round and brings total funding to $95 million. Backers include strategic healthcare organizations such as Healthier Capital; healthcare clients; and VCs Norwest, Define Ventures, and Black Opal Ventures.

Krush notes that the new funding will go toward developing AI agents that help patients navigate specialty care, such as in orthopedics and cardiology, and agents that reach out to patients to remind them to schedule screenings and other care.

Within the last two months, Hyro earned the Fierce Healthcare Innovation Awards 2025 and was named a CB Insights’ 2025 Digital Health 50 and Salesforce 2025 Partner Innovation Award winner in Healthcare for its groundbreaking role in developing voice AI agents that improve the patient experience and transform healthcare operations.

Carina Storrs is a freelance writer for Cornell Tech.