Startup Ellipsis Health wants to fill gaps in care management using artificial-intelligence-powered voice agents.

The company developed Sage, an AI care manager, designed to support patients with complex physical, behavioral and social needs, who drive the majority of healthcare costs. 

Ellipsis closed a hefty $45 million series A funding round led by Salesforce, Khosla Ventures and CVS Health Ventures. Previous investors Mitsui Global Investment, Collier, E12 and AME Cloud Ventures also participated in the round, the company said in a press release.

The company says it developed the AI voice agent to solve a persistent problem in healthcare: How do you provide empathetic, high-quality care management when you can’t find enough people to do the job?

Sage can support care management by expanding staffing capacity and reducing operating costs with proactive patient engagement, executives said. "It can conduct health risk assessments, provide post-discharge follow-ups, coordinate care transitions, and even do those Friday 'tuck-in' calls that patients love but are often the first thing cut when staffing gets tight," the company said on its website.

Ellipsis said it developed Sage using its proprietary "Empathy Engine," built on patented vocal biomarker technology and trained on millions of live clinical patient calls.

The startup said it will use the fresh funding to expand Sage's adoption across healthcare providers, payers and care management organizations. The company also will invest in its AI capabilities and deepen clinical integrations with partners like Salesforce Health Cloud.

According to its website, Ellipsis works with UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, which is part of CVS Health, DukeHealth, Highmark, Main Street Health and many other healthcare organizations.

The company contends Sage is different than traditional AI-powered voice assistants as it is designed to be emotionally intelligent. It can adjust its tone and approach based on a patient's emotional state and mental health needs, ensuring high levels of engagement and behavior change, executives said.

Phone conversations between clinicians and patients are essential to deliver between-visit care—supporting triage and care coordination along with disease and case management—and improve outcomes and costs for payers and health systems. Clinical staff assess physical, mental and social needs, guide treatment adherence and coordinate care.

Ellipsis aims to use AI to handle all these time-intensive tasks.

Healthcare providers are facing a perfect storm of challenges with staffing shortages, burnout, rising patient complexity, pressure to reduce operating costs and the need to improve quality metrics like HEDIS scores and star ratings. Those challenges make it difficult to scale care management programs.

Ellipsis' Sage can provide patients with 24/7 support and care, and these services can be effectively scaled through the use of AI, executives said.

"Sage derives the clinical understanding from our experience developing vocal biomarkers in case management conversations and builds an empathetic, longitudinal care journey by leveraging Salesforce's Health Cloud with its clinical partners, which meets the needs of high-risk, high-cost members," said Mainul Mondal, CEO and founder of Ellipsis Health, in a statement. 

"Sage alleviates staffing shortages, rising costs, and increasing patient needs by linking with the Salesforce Health Cloud workflow engine to seamlessly integrate into existing clinical operations, delivering measurable improvements in healthcare operations and patient outcomes," Mondal said.

The company says its technology has resulted in a 60% reduction in administrative tasks, 6x faster program enrollment and 4x return on investment.

"As a former health system CEO and practicing physician, I've seen how hard it is to deliver quality care between visits, especially amid staffing shortages and clinician burnout," said Hal Paz, M.D., of Khosla Ventures in a statement. "Voice-based care management has become essential, but it's nearly impossible to scale cost-effectively or without significant loss of quality. Sage stands apart by training its AI on real clinical conversations, enabling emotionally intelligent, context-aware support, even for the most complex patients. This helps clinicians practice at the top of their license, scale high-quality care, and reduce costs—a win for providers, patients, and health systems alike."

Care management is an area that is ripe for innovation using conversational and agentic AI.

Startup Hippocratic AI launched a healthcare AI agent app store to enable clinicians to design and shape AI agents to address patient care and operational challenges. Innovaccer unveiled a suite of pretrained AI agents that are voice-activated and can communicate with patients for appointment scheduling, protocol intake, managing referrals and answering routine patient inquiries.

Companies are exploring other uses of AI voice agents as well. Fair Square Medicare built AI-based voice agents to screen seniors for insurance coverage and improve and streamline the customer experience. Infinitus AI also rolled out a patient-facing voice agent that Zing Health is using to automate patient calls for health risk assessments. And Zocdoc unveiled a voice AI agent called Zo to book appointments by phone.

"Amid the rapid innovation unfolding across this space, we believe Ellipsis is positioned to lead—grounded in its strong clinical foundation and differentiated by its thoughtful approach to market positioning," said Vijay Patel, vice president and managing partner of CVS Health Ventures, in a statement.