$16M round for health tech startup growing AI agents to perform administrative tasks

A Seattle company with a talent hub in Kansas City announced Wednesday a $16 million seed round that includes investment from KCRise Fund and a promise to leverage conversational artificial intelligence alongside human talent to boost workplace productivity.

Outbound AI emerged from stealth mode in 2022 to a market hungry for solutions, said Stead Burwell, co-founder and CEO of the startup, noting demand driven by the healthcare industry’s administrative burdens — challenges more acute than ever in the face of post-pandemic resource and budget constraints, he added.

“We’ve developed AI-powered virtual agents capable of performing many different administrative tasks, and our software consoles provide customers with complete transparency, visibility and control,” Burwell said. “We started in revenue cycle, but our Conversation AI Cloud is poised to support healthcare knowledge workers across a variety of functional areas, settings and specialties.”

The funding round is co-led by Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group and SpringRock Ventures, as well as including investment from Epic Ventures, Ascend, Pack Ventures, Locke Capital, Tacoma Venture Fund and KCRise Fund.

Ryan Greenhaw, Outbound AI

“We made an intentional decision to form the base of our commercial team in Kansas City, and we’re thrilled to have the support of KCRise Fund,” said Burwell, emphasizing that Kansas City is recognized as a major metropolitan hub within the Silicon Prairie and boasts a burgeoning health tech sector.

Click here to check out more of KCRise Fund’s portfolio.

The startup’s chief revenue officer, Ryan Greenhaw, is among its top talent based in Kansas City. 

Outbound AI defines its mission as “elevating the human work experience in healthcare,” which embodies Burwell’s commitment to a core philosophy of human-agent teaming, he said.

“We’re creating great partnerships between human workers and AI-powered virtual agents,” said Burwell. “Our focus is on repetitive, time-intensive work that keeps human talent from functioning at the top of their license. Importantly, we’re augmenting human talent, not replacing it.”

The startup’s virtual agents operate at up to four to five times the pace of their human partners for a fraction of the cost, said Jonathan Wiggs, co-founder and CTO at Outbound AI.

“Our virtual agents run 24/7 at peak capacity and they scale on demand to accommodate any volume,” he said. “This allows their human partners to offload rote tasks and get more high-value work done.”

“What we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers want out-of-the-box solutions that can be implemented quickly, without disruption to workflows and with immediate effect,” Wiggs added.

Automation is nothing new, said Tim Porter of Madrona Venture Group, but the startup’s use of artificial intelligence to achieve new solutions is groundbreaking amid a crisis in health care.

“The approach Outbound AI is taking by partnering with human talent on administrative tasks is unlike anything we’ve seen to date from other health tech companies,” he said.