Olive AI Inc. is valued at $4 billion after raising $400 million – the largest VC round at the highest valuation in Ohio history.
The Columbus maker of machine learning software, which increased its customer base by 50% to 900 U.S. hospitals over recent months, beats out its sibling in the Drive Capital LLC portfolio: Root Inc. held both records with a $350 million funding round at $3.65 billion valuation in September 2019. The digital insurer went on to the state's largest-ever IPO last fall.
Vista Equity Partners and Base10 Partners led Olive's round, with returning investor Tiger Global (also a Root investor), CEO Sean Lane confirmed via email.
The single round also surpasses the $384 million Olive raised in three chunks last year, the final Tiber-led $335 million round valuing it at $1.5 billion in December.
After that, Lane projected "monumentally big moves" for this year.
In 2017 Olive debuted its AI bot for hospital administration, which works in the background on repetitive back-office tasks. It tripled sales year-over-year in 2017 and 2018, doubled in 2019 and again tripled in 2020; dollar amounts aren't disclosed. Through engineering growth and acquisitions, this year Olive is building on that foundation to make the bot more of an independent decision-maker and even an adviser, followed by capabilities to ensure faster and more complete insurance reimbursement, and clinical decision-making tools to reduce waste and improve patient outcomes.
This year, the company announced a partnership with TriHealth, one of Cincinnati's largest health care systems, to open an on-site AI-powered command center that could help drive increased automation.
"In order to change fundamentally the way health care works, you have to change the infrastructure, and you have to have the data," Lane said in December. He was not immediately available for comment on Thursday.
The money fuels aggressive growth in both product and sales. Olive recently topped 800 employees across more than 40 states, up from 230 at the start of last year, and expects to double to 1,600 by mid-2022. Four out of five hires are outside of Central Ohio since a distributed workforce model adopted in the throes of the pandemic proved an advantage in the tight tech labor market.
Vista, an Austin-based private equity firm, has $75 billion under management and looks for technologies it believes can make lives healthier and more equitable. San Francisco-based Base10 focuses on automation technology.
This May, Kumi Walker, a former Twitter executive who's chief business development and strategy officer at Root, joined Olive's board.
VC investments are soaring overall but not shifting the geographic dominance of California, New York and Massachusetts. Despite breaking records Ohio still accounted for only 1% of all venture capital raised nationwide in 2020, according to an annual report by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.
