Bunkerhill Health raises $55 million to put AI agents to work inside hospitals

In 2017, Nishith Khandwala was a Stanford computer science student with an idea—that you could take existing radiology scans, and use AI to check them at scale and detect heart disease and heart attack risk early. 

For years, he and classmate David Eng developed the project—but even when it worked, they hit a wall. Hospitals more or less shooed them away, and it seemed like it might be time to move on. But in 2020, Khandwala’s father had a heart attack. 

“The cardiologist told us: ‘There was actually a scan in the past that showed he had an increased risk of heart disease, I think we could have caught this earlier,’” said Khandwala, now CEO of Bunkerhill Health. “Can you imagine? Think about the millions of patients for whom you could prevent those kinds of heart attacks. The key thing though was: We weren’t unique in having a great idea. Great ideas are everywhere, we just don’t translate them into reality.”

Bunkerhill—which Khandwala cofounded with Eng in 2019—takes its name from a single-season 2010s CBS TV show that was decisively panned, but had a central, sticky idea: that medicine can iterate faster. The startup, then, deploys AI agents to handle the tasks that hospitals most need to solve, from long wait times to missed follow-ups to paperwork backlogs. Bunkerhill doesn’t suggest use cases so much as hospitals ask if the company’s agents can solve a problem. 

Currently, the company works with 15 health systems via its Carebricks platform, including Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Ballad Health, Intermountain Health, Sentara Health, Endeavor Health, and The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) Health. Embedded in its platform, the company has both operational agents and nine clinical FDA-cleared AI algorithms, including one that detects silent heart valve disease early and another that assesses osteoporosis risk. 

Bunkerhill disclosed its funding for the first time this week exclusively to Fortune: The startup recently closed its $25 million Series B, led by Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to $55 million. Sequoia, Felicis, Optum Ventures, and Y Combinator also participated in this latest round. Vinod Khosla—known as an early OpenAI backer and Sun Microsystems legend—has been backing healthcare companies for decades, and he thinks hospitals are more eager to adopt new technology than ever. AI is a mandate now, he said.

“Software used to be a pain for hospitals,” Khosla told Fortune. “There wasn’t a push to adopt it, other than the medical record and it sort of........

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