Attendees walk through an expo hall at AWS re:Invent, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, at the Venetian in Las Vegas on Nov. 28, 2023.
Noah Berger | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Amazon Web Services and venture capital firm General Catalyst on Monday announced a new multi-year partnership in their latest push to carve out a piece of health-care’s growing artificial intelligence market.
Through the collaboration, General Catalyst portfolio companies will use AWS’ services to build and roll out AI tools for health systems more quickly. Aidoc, which applies AI to medical imaging, and Commure, which automates provider workflows with AI, will be the first two companies to participate.
No financial terms were disclosed in the announcement.
“Without a strong partner like Amazon and AWS to stand alongside them, to co-develop and support these companies … it’s not going to move as fast as we hope,” Chris Bischoff, head of global health-care investing at General Catalyst, told CNBC in an interview.
Health systems are strained in the U.S., with staff burnout, growing labor shortages and razor-thin margins. These challenges often seem enticing for enterprising tech startups to tackle, especially as the multi-trillion dollar health-care industry dangles the prospect of large financial returns.
Hospitals operate in a complex, technology-weary and highly-regulated sector that can be difficult for startups to break into. General Catalyst is hoping to help its companies fast-track the development and go-to-market process by leveraging resources like computing power from AWS.
General Catalyst is no stranger to taking big swings in health-care.
The firm has closed more than 60 digital health deals since 2020, behind only Gaingels and Alumni Ventures, according to a December report from PitchBook. Last January, General Catalyst shocked the industry by announcing that its new business, the Health Assurance Transformation Company, planned to acquire an Ohio-based health system – an unprecedented move in venture capital.
General Catalyst’s “deep understanding” of health systems’ financial and operating realities made it an attractive partner for AWS, Dan Sheeran, AWS’ general manager of Healthcare & Life Science, told CNBC. Sheeran and Bischoff began outlining the collaboration between the two groups after meeting in London around nine months ago.
AWS also has an established presence in the health-care sector. The company offers more health- and life-sciences-specific services than any other cloud provider, according to a release, and it inked other high-profile AI partnerships with GE HealthCare, Philips and others last year.
The partnership between General Catalyst and AWS will stretch over several years, but new tools from Aidoc and Commure are coming in 2025. Aidoc is exploring how it can use the cloud to tap data modalities across pathology, cardiology, genomics and other molecular information, for instance.
Aidoc and Commure were selected to kick off the collaboration because they have both established a product-market fit, are operational and are focused on issues that are a high priority for AWS customers.
“GC has spent a lot of time thinking about how health systems can transform themselves, and we recognize that it’s not going to be through 1,000 companies, and we need solutions that are really enterprise grade,” Bischoff said. “Amazon shares the same vision, so we are starting with these two.”
Though the partnership between General Catalyst and AWS is still in its early days, the organizations said they believe it will help serve as a way to meet the market’s growing demand for new solutions.
“Health system leaders who want to realize the benefits of AI now have an easier way to accomplish that,” Sheeran said.
