By Carina Storrs
Hyro, a health tech startup founded at Cornell Tech that tackles health care inefficiencies with voice AI agentsraised $45 million in a recent growth investment round and received several prestigious recognitions.
Hyro was born 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’s degrees in engineering, respectively. At the time, Alexa and Google Home Speaker were just starting to take off but only offered basic functions like playing a song and setting an alarm.
“We imagined a future in which AI agents were omnipresent around us, and the question was how can organizations around the world adapt to this new technology? says Krush, CEO and co-founder of Hyro.
Krush and Cohen credit Startup Studio instructors and other Cornell Tech experts for instilling in them the importance of focusing on the needs of a single industry. “The more we looked at the healthcare industry, the more we saw the opportunity to make a huge impact there,” said Cohen, COO and co-founder of Hyro. The duo began developing conversational AI agents that help patients access information about their primary care and enable health systems to optimize their use of human agents in call centers.
Karan GirotraCharles H. Dyson professor of family management at Cornell Tech, who co-led the Startup Studio course, saw Krush and Cohen’s open-mindedness about their startup idea as an asset. “They threw themselves into the program and took full advantage of everything Cornell Tech offers, demonstrating that students do not 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 on their deep tech, health, 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.”
Towards the end of the course, Hyro was selected as one of the companies to present to industry leaders and investors. Hyro caught the attention of Deborah Estrinassociate dean for impact at Cornell Tech, who presented the idea to Curtis Cole, then CIO of Weill Cornell Medicine (now senior vice president and global chief information officer of Weill Cornell). Their enthusiasm resulted in Hyro’s first investor in Cornell Tech and first client in Weill Cornell.
Today, Hyro counts 45 major healthcare organizations as clients, including Baptist Health System, Intermountain Health and Bon Secours Mercy Health. It manages millions of conversations with their patients. Hyro AI agents chat with patients when they place a call or request help through the patient portal or website for services such as checking or scheduling appointments, refilling prescriptions, and billing assistance.
In the rare cases where an agent cannot complete the task, it hands the conversation over to a human. Although patients tend to say they prefer humans before speaking with a Hyro AI agent, they quickly get used to the AI version because they realize they can get help much faster, Krush says.
In terms of customers, “they see us as partners in adapting to this new world of AI and becoming more efficient,” says Krush. Large healthcare organizations using Hyro technology save millions of dollars annually by reducing their call center needs.
Hyro’s $45M Growth Investment Round Just Comes 10 months after its previous round and brings the total funding to $95 million. Backers include strategic healthcare organizations such as Healthier Capital; healthcare clients; and venture capital firms 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 contact patients to remind them to schedule screenings and other care.
Over the past two months, Hyro won the 2025 Fierce Healthcare Innovation Awards 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 AI voice agents that improve patient experiences and transform healthcare operations.
Carina Storrs is a freelance writer for Cornell Tech.