How Confido Puts AI Agents To Work To Keep Patients Happy

When Indian entrepreneur Chetan Reddy took his wife to the US for an operation on her spine, he was hugely impressed by the high-quality medical care she received but shocked by the administrative burden the treatment required. “I spent 80% of the time she was in hospital making phone calls and filling in forms, rather than at her bedside,” he recalls. “The operation was a complete success, but I couldn’t believe how much bureaucracy was involved.”

Several years later, with Reddy now living in the US, the experience provided the inspiration for his launch of Confido Health, which specialises in using automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to cut through such red tape. The New York-based business, which Reddy co-founded last year with Vichar Shroff, will today announce it has secured $3 million of seed funding from investors.

“The US healthcare system is renowned for its fragmentation and for huge amounts of paperwork, but another problem is that healthcare providers can’t recruit the people they need to do that work,” Reddy says. “That puts extra stress on the employees they do have; it’s a vicious circle because they end up quitting.”

Confido Health describes its solution as “AI-powered digital workers on healthcare’s front lines”. In practice, that means the start-up has developed tools that enable healthcare providers to trust many key tasks – and chains of tasks – to AI. “Our agents can do the mundane and repetitive jobs that healthcare providers’ staff currently have to do manually,” Reddy explains. “It means there is less need to hire in a market where it’s so difficult to find staff, and it also reduces the stresses on existing employees.”

Confido Health is certainly not the first business to promise healthcare providers it can put AI to work to solve such problems. But Reddy and Shroff believe their solution is different because it works with providers’ existing systems, rather than requiring workers to learn how to use yet another piece of software. It also focuses on entire processes, rather than individual pieces of the jigsaw, to deliver patient outcomes without manual interventions wherever possible.

That might be anything from setting up an appointment to ordering a refill of a prescription – seemingly simple tasks that actually require multiple steps in today’s complex healthcare sector.

“What sets us apart is our ability to create AI solutions that seamlessly integrate with legacy systems, turning fragmented and unstructured data into actionable workflows in real time,” says Shroff, who now serves as chief product officer to Reddy’s CEO. “This is a transformative innovation that not only optimises operational processes but fundamentally enhances patient outcomes.”

It’s a promise that is beginning to generate significant interest from customers – Confido Health has so far signed up around 20 healthcare providers with around 50,000 patients on their books.

One good example is Jacob Zitterkopf, the owner of a multi-clinic dental practice in Colorado. “Confido Health’s workflows have transformed our approach by proactively communicating with patients, ensuring they feel cared for, listened to, and understood,” Zitterkopf says of the technology. “This not only improves our clinics’ efficiency and communication but also enhances the overall patient experience.”

Confido hopes to build on such successes with further investment in its technology, enabling it to extend the workloads that its AI agents can undertake. Further investment in security is also a high priority in an industry where many patients feel nervous about the use of AI. “All it takes is one mistake for the industry to lose the confidence of its customers,” Reddy warns.

Today’s $3 million seed funding round will help the company pursue these goals. The round is led by Together Fund, with participation from MedMountain Ventures, Rebellion VC, DeVC, Operators Studio and a number of strategic healthcare operators. The company previously raised a pre-seed round that was led by Momentum Capital.

“Confido Health is redefining the operational backbone of specialty healthcare with its AI-powered digital workforce,” says Shubham Gupta, co-founder and general partner at Together Fund. “By building healthcare AI agents to tackle complex administrative workflows and deliver tangible results, it is poised to solve the workforce shortages and cost pressures, and to become the essential infrastructure for modern healthcare operations.”

Other investors are equally enthusiastic. “Confido’s solution alleviates the burden of shortages of nursing and allied health professional personnel, and allows clinical practices to continue serving patients in need that would otherwise not receive care due to lack of scheduling, follow-up, or education,” says Jane Wang, an investor at MedMountain Ventures.

Jukka Alanen, managing partner of Rebellion Ventures, adds: “The healthcare system desperately needs innovation to raise productivity, enhance staff experience, and improve responsiveness to patients’ needs.”