As the adoption of artificial intelligence in healthcare rapidly grows, health tech company Artera aims to stay out in front in the race to deploy AI agents.
The 10-year-old company has been strategically building out its AI capabilities with a focus on virtual AI agents. The company's AI agents are designed to support front-desk staff in improving patient access, including self-scheduling, intake, forms and billing.
Artera secured a $65 million growth investment to fuel further expansion and the adoption of agentic AI in healthcare. The growth investment included support from existing investors and lead investor Lead Edge Capital as well as Jackson Square Ventures, Health Velocity Capital, Heritage Medical Systems and Summation Health Ventures.
“The race to leverage agentic AI in healthcare will not be won with technology alone; building AI agents is quickly becoming commoditized,” said Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and co-founder of Artera. “Success requires technology paired with deep domain experience, extensive real-world data and distribution channels that allow for quick and easy activation. Artera has all three, which provides an essential and defensible competitive moat.”
The company considers itself a "first mover" in tech innovation in the patient communications space.
Artera is leading the way with AI infrastructure by using standards like Model Context Protocol, de Zwirek noted. The company also has an extensive, real-world data set that gives it an "unmatched foundation" for training, deploying and monitoring agentic AI solutions that are accurate, compliant and highly effective within healthcare, he said.
New entrants lack this depth of historical, operational knowledge, company executives assert.
"We think this is our market to lose," de Zwirek said. "To determine the winners in AI, it's not going to be a technology win. This is who's got the best and the most data, who's got the best distribution and who has the broadest and deepest domain expertise," he added.
The company, which de Zwirek said is profitable, also reached a major milestone, hitting $100 million in contracted annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025.
Artera, formerly Well Health, developed a unified patient communications platform aimed at streamlining the numerous texts and emails health systems send to patients. The company now works with more than 1,000 provider organizations including specialty groups, federally qualified health centers, large IDNs and federal agencies. Healthcare organizations have used Artera’s AI solutions to engage more than 200 million patients. Artera supports over 2 billion patient-to-provider communications annually, the company said.
Artera now works with many multispecialty private practices, de Zwirek said, or practices with 20 to 150 doctors. These practices tend to use modern cloud solutions, as opposed to legacy, on-premise solutions, which makes the electronic health record integrations easier to manage with more flexibility and scalability.
Agentic AI represents the "next big opportunity" to bend the cost curve and improve the patient experience, de Zwirek told Fierce Healthcare. "We have staffing shortages, we have a lot of turnover in the call centers and in nursing. We have a massive Cost of Goods Sold problem, and we have diminishing reimbursements. Agentic AI Is in a place where we believe it can be deployed safely and securely and at scale in healthcare, and it is now at the quality level where it is often as good as a human equivalent, if not better because it can work 24/7, and it is reliable," he said.
Last fall, Artera rolled out two AI co-pilot tools to alleviate administrative drudgery for healthcare workers. Its Staff AI Co-Pilot can help healthcare staff with automatic translation, message shortening and conversation summaries. The company's Insights AI Co-Pilot analyzes patient engagement data to provide actionable insights. That co-pilot is designed to help staff "cut through the clutter" with clear action items and highlighted conversations that require quick attention.
Last year, Artera rolled out its flow agents, which are rules-based AI assistants that automate routine patient conversations across clinical and administrative use cases. These solutions complete 94% of conversations without staff intervention, according to the company. Healthcare providers are using the flow agents to communicate with patients about bills, intake forms, appointment confirmations and care instructions. The company has facilitated 42 million unique "flow agent" sessions this year, saving 250,000 hours of staff time annually, the company claims.
The company also has been developing autonomous AI agents that can function like digital office staff, interacting with patients over the phone or via text in a realistic manner.
"We expect all of our workflows to convert to autonomous agentic workflows," de Zwirek said. "We are making a strong effort in deploying across healthcare for as many use cases as possible. We've started with the highest value, lowest effort use cases, things like scheduling," he added.
Artera plans to expand its AI agents to other healthcare use cases including prescription management and referrals, he said.
With the fresh funding, the company plans to "lean in" on sales, marketing and distribution in 2026, de Zwirek said.
"Our big discovery is this is not technically challenging to build. We believe that technology is actually a commodity," de Zwirek said. "The real opportunity is safe, rapid distribution to help practices deal with the changing economics of healthcare."
The company plans to use the bulk of the fresh funding to boost distribution. "We have 1,000 customers, and we are an 'easy button' for them to turn on safe, scalable, world-class agentic AI solutions," he noted.
Artera has an established distribution network along with integrations and trusted relationships that "drastically accelerate the path to deploying agents in production," company executives said.
By comparison, new entrants often face significant time and resource barriers attempting to sell, train, create specialty workflows and establish the EHR relationships required to have a successful production deployment, executives assert.
Artera's platform has become the “white labeled” communications solution of major EHRs, including Oracle Health’s Unified Consumer Communications and Meditech’s Expanse Patient Connect.
Security and compliance are also critical to safely deploy AI solutions. Artera says its virtual agent features meet top industry standards—SOC 2 Type 2, HITRUST Certified, ISO and HIPAA compliant. Plus, Artera does not use PHI/PII in training models.
A growing list of startups see opportunities to apply AI to patient communications and back-end administrative work, and they are attracting big investments. EliseAI, a company that initially started as an AI company automating communications in the rental and leasing industry, made a move to break into healthcare, seeing opportunities to use AI to tackle administrative tasks. The New York-based company picked up $250 million in series E funding.
Assort Health, a specialty-specific AI platform for managing patient phone calls, recently raised a $76 million series B round, and startup Hello Patient built generative-AI-based agents to handle patient communications for medical practices.
Major players in the health tech industry also are quickly building AI agents specifically for healthcare. This year, Microsoft rolled out a new AI assistant for healthcare professionals that it billed as an all-in-one technology that combines voice dictation, ambient listening and gen AI. Innovaccer unveiled a suite of pretrained AI agents that can communicate with patients for appointment scheduling, managing referrals and answering routine questions. Salesforce also released Agentforce for Health, a new library of prebuilt agent skills and actions.