SAN FRANCISCO—Hippocratic AI is building out its life sciences division to accelerate generative and agentic artificial intelligence in the biopharma and medtech sectors.
The company, which developed patient-facing generative AI healthcare agents, acquired Grove AI, a startup that offers agentic AI for pharma R&D and clinical trial operations. The company's AI solutions aim to streamline clinical trial participant engagement, notably with an AI agent named "Grace," with the goal of speeding up recruitment and reducing operational burdens in life sciences.
Grove AI, which launched in 2024, supported more than 10 million patient interactions over the past year.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The life sciences industry has been slower to adopt agentic AI due to the complexities of regulatory compliance, noted Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI.
"Unlike general-purpose LLMs, real impact in this sector requires deeply specialized models, exhaustive safety testing and architectures built to operate within highly regulated environments,” he said.
"There are really specific compliance needs that need to be met here—they're not like 'nice to haves', they're 'have to haves'. That's part of what we're all building together. Even in clinical trials, there's certain regulations, certain things that an agent can do, certain things that really a human has to be the last one to verify enrollment, certain steps of enrollment and disclosure," Shah noted. "That's requiring a whole new approach. It's requiring the resources and the ability to really innovate at the model level that Hippocratic has had. You can't just prompt your way through it, by and large, and so we've really brought together this whole team to really accelerate that journey."
With the addition of the Grove AI team, Hippocratic AI is actively collaborating with five of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies to deploy first-in-market AI agents for patient and provider engagement at enterprise scale, according to the company. For clinical trial site management organizations and clinical research organizations, Grove AI's technology can speed up participant recruitment and increase screening pass rates.
"At Grove, the vision has always been, essentially, how can we accelerate the time it takes for drugs to get to market. We started with clinical trials, and in the last year, Grove has powered more than 50 phase 2 and 3 clinical trials," Sohit Gatiganti, co-founder of Grove AI, told Fierce Healthcare. "When we met with Munjal and the team, we realized we had a common vision and shared goal to really become the leader in building an end-to-end agentic AI platform in life sciences. The next step for Grove, naturally, was to extend to use cases outside of clinical trials, so we wanted to build in commercial, direct-to-patient, HCP (healthcare provider) sales. Hippocratic shared that vision. So by joining forces, we want to build the first-in-market, best-in-class, end-to-end life sciences agentic AI platform."
The acquisition deal follows Hippocratic AI's $126 million series C round in November. At the time, Shah said the company would use the financing to fuel acquisition deals.
The acquisition brings two cornerstone offerings to Hippocratic AI’s life sciences portfolio—the company's AI agent, named Grace, that supports end-to-end patient engagement, recruitment and follow-up across voice, text and email and the Grove AI participant relationship management platform.
To lead its newly established life sciences division. Hippocratic AI tapped Ahad Wahid, M.D., a former National Health Service surgeon and member of the U.K.'s General Medical Council’s Quality Assurance Board.
Wahid brings deep expertise in patient safety and regulatory rigor, according to the company. He spent a decade as a partner at Boston Consulting Group, where he led global AI and healthcare transformation initiatives and advised executive teams and boards at more than 30 leading healthcare organizations. Wahid will now serve as president of life sciences at Hippocratic AI.
The company also formed a life sciences executive advisory council and is now collaborating with Boston Consulting Group to accelerate agentic AI across biopharma and medtech.
"The acquisition of Grove AI, combined with our expanded leadership team, advisory council and collaboration with BCG, gives us the foundation to operationalize agentic AI across research, clinical and patient engagement workflows. My focus is ensuring these technologies are deployed responsibly, measurably, and at enterprise scale so innovation translates into real outcomes for patients and organizations alike,” Wahid said.
Wahid is bullish on Hippocratic's AI ability to lead the life sciences industry in the adoption of agentic AI.
"In life sciences, there's been somewhat of a lag in uptake on AI. There's been this 'thousand flowers' approach, but very little around consolidation and consolidated uptake. I think one of the reasons is the need for real depth and compliance and safety and regulation. That's what the Hippocratic team brings in droves," Wahid said.
He added, "I think we're now moving from this 'thousand flowers' approach and pilot-first to recognizing that actually we're going to now be looking for foundational, agentic layers, and that's what Hippocratic provides. So in life sciences, we're able to address the entire value chain," he said. "We now have offerings around patient service and patient support, market access, marketing, and even the idea of a super sales reps, agentic sales rep, that can directly call upon HCPs [healthcare providers]. That's really breakthrough to have something that tackles the entire value chain."
The company plans to build healthcare agents that interact with healthcare providers to educate them on new drug products or take calls about adverse events, Shah noted.
Biopharma companies are interested in deploying agentic AI in R&D operations as well as commercial, Wahid said.
"I think you'll start to see a key theme from our life sciences partners. You'll start to see this idea around consolidation. We're speaking to CEOs who are saying there's infighting between CIOs and CFOs in that CIOs want to continue to experiment and CFOs want to really start to show value and have more consolidated AI plays. I think that's going to be a real win for Hippocratic in the coming quarters," he noted.
Shah noted that agentic AI opens up the opportunity for biopharma companies to have agentic workers doing tasks that would be too expensive for human staff to tackle. Companies can expand their sales teams for every drug in a company's portfolio, extend their patient support programs and develop outreach to rural providers.
"There's a lot you can do on clinical trials and ongoing adherence during the trial. What if the AI can just call patients and remind them to take a medication just to ensure compliance and adherence in the trial," he said.
Shah added, "What we actually saw in the last six months is that there's this additional class of use cases we called 'infinite pilot', which is around, 'Don't give us things you do today, give us things you wouldn't have done until AI came along.' This kind of abundance model allows us to rethink how we do healthcare."
The company continues to eye M&A opportunities and is looking to make more deals in both the healthcare and life sciences sectors in 2026, Shah said.
To support its work in life sciences, Hippocratic tapped seasoned leaders for its advisory council, including Jim Meyers, former chief commercial officer at Gilead Sciences; Michael Norton, former VP of global medical affairs at AbbVie, with over 20 years in R&D and medical leadership across AbbVie and Abbott; David Pierce, former president of medsurg, endoscopy and urology at Boston Scientific; and Richard Klausner, M.D., former director of the National Cancer Institute, former executive director at the Gates Foundation and co-founder of Altos Labs.
These executives bring deep expertise across therapeutic areas, commercialization, medical affairs, quality and device innovation, executives said.
With the Boston Consulting Group collaboration, the two companies will focus on helping pharma and medtech clients adopt generative AI solutions aligned with commercial, R&D and medical affairs goals.