Hyro is a leading Adaptive Communications Platform that enables enterprises to automate workflows and conversations across their most valuable platforms, services, and channels, including call centers, websites, SMS, and mobile apps. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Hyro CEO and co-founder Israel Krush to learn more.
Israel Krush’s Background
Krush accumulated more than 15 years of experience in emerging technologies before founding Hyro. Krush said:
“Starting as a software engineer at Intel, I steadily progressed to overseeing engineering and product teams at various Israeli startups, eventually advancing to Head of Product at Zeekit, a computer vision company acquired by Walmart. I began my leadership career as an officer in Unit 8200, the IDF’s elite technology and intelligence unit. I hold an MBA from Cornell University and a B.Sc in Computer Science and Statistics from Tel Aviv University (magna cum laude).”
Formation Of Hyro
How did the idea for Hyro come together? Krush shared:
“During our time as students at Cornell Tech, my co-founder Rom Cohen and I became aware of the demand for enhanced voice solutions. Like many others, we were captivated by the advancements in voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home but ultimately found ourselves unimpressed by their limited functionalities and lack of dynamic experiences.”
“From this point, we came to two key realizations. First, it became evident that natural language interfaces would dominate the field of Human-Computer Interaction, encompassing not only voice but also natural language interactions. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have only reinforced this point.”
“And second, we recognized the immense obstacles to deploying and maintaining high-quality conversational AI assistants – they require expertise, time, capital, access to real-time and constantly evolving custom data, complex integrations, explainability, compliance, and much more.”
“With these insights in mind, we established Hyro with the goal of providing enterprises with the AI-powered assistants they desired, ultimately relieving their staff from repetitive calls and simplifying their workflows. Our focus was immediately on the health sector, as it is an industry awash with information where patients often struggle to find the answers they need or complete necessary actions. Through extensive discussions with top healthcare executives, it became evident that this industry was in dire need of a digital transformation to meet the demands of both patients and workers.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for Hyro so far? Krush reflected.
“It was Purim 2021, a Jewish holiday where it’s traditional to throw costume parties. At the time, we had about 35 employees in the company, and our costume party was superhero-themed (we call our team members SuperHyros). As I danced and celebrated alongside my team, I think it was the first time I fully digested the fact that we’d not only built a tech company but also created a community. This assortment of talented individuals come together not only for work but also to connect, laugh, and foster long-lasting relationships – whether we’re dressed as Batman and Wonder Woman or in regular office attire.”
Economic Impact
Has the current macroeconomic climate affected the company? Krush noted:
“C-level executives recognize that solutions to bridge staffing shortages and combat burnout are must-haves, and, despite a difficult economy, we expect large health systems to continue embracing AI assistants to help mitigate those challenges. Generally, though, we always prioritize efficiency at Hyro, so while we are targeting rapid growth, we also maintain a responsible burn rate and optimize for success with the current resources at our disposal.”
Core Products
What are Hyro’s core products and features? Krush explained:
“Hyro’s Adaptive Communications Platform is revolutionizing AI-powered conversations by bridging the gap between clients and their end-users across pivotal digital channels, including websites, call centers, apps, and SMS.”
“Hyro’s platform taps into an organization’s existing data sources and scrapes them to construct a comprehensive knowledge graph. It then uses its NLU (Natural Language Understanding) engine to parse the sentence and understand its linguistic composition to retrieve relevant information. Finally, it aggregates all of the conversations into a sophisticated analytics layer that not only identifies knowledge gaps, but also highlights topics and queries that patients are asking about but which are not featured in the data that’s been scraped. This invaluable feedback loop empowers organizations to continually enhance their AI assistants while gaining crucial insights into user needs.”
“In an age of generative AI, labor shortages, and economic uncertainty, organizations everywhere will be looking to eliminate low-level tasks to further drive efficiency. This means automation is no longer simply nice to have. The x-factor in the market will be those solutions providers that best blend together key components of conversational AI, including emerging technologies such as large language models, and we’re best positioned to accomplish that at Hyro.”
Evolution Of Hyro’s Technology
How has Hyro’s technology evolved since launching? Krush pointed out:
“Taking a unique approach to conversational AI, Hyro’s platform combines both linguistics and knowledge to quite literally learn human language- it then continuously layers use cases on top of that, enabling a more comprehensive and nuanced conversational experience.”
“Rather than following pre-set guidelines, as most conversational AI interfaces do, Hyro’s platform parses sentences and understands the context to ensure higher success rates. That same architecture-a combination of computational linguistics and knowledge graphs- has served as the core of our solution from day one, with constant improvements to the platform’s natural language understanding engine and parsing capabilities. Relying on an architecture that demands no maintenance or training means that over the years, we have been able to pick and choose different components to enrich our solutions, for example, Google’s text-to-speech (TTS) services. That also means that we can now use GPT-4 to unlock new use cases for our solution, taking advantage of its ability to instantly generate answers to FAQs and search queries using customized enterprise data while providing our customers with the control, compliance, and explainability their heavily-regulated sectors demand.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Hyro’s most significant milestones? Krush cited:
“In May 2023, we closed our $20 million Series B funding round, led by Macquarie Capital, with participation from new investors Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Black Opal Ventures, and K20, as well as existing investors Hanaco Ventures, Spero Ventures, and Mindset Ventures. This brought our total funding to $35 million.”
“A year prior, we were named as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Conversational and Natural Language Technology.”
“One important milestone that I think is very significant for us to highlight here is our offering during the COVID-19 pandemic. We released a free COVID-19 Assistant that could be deployed within 48 hours to field COVID-19 FAQs and perform symptoms triage. Within weeks dozens of US health systems deployed the assistant to immense success, with most ultimately becoming paying customers.”
Customer Success Story
In terms of customer success stories, Krush highlighted:
“As stated earlier, the healthcare industry has been our primary focus thus far. We have successfully implemented our solutions across various channels, with Voice AI and Call Centers emerging as the most popular choices. Within this domain, we have identified key use cases that consistently account for a substantial portion, typically representing 60-70% of all traffic to health systems; this includes scheduling new appointments, managing existing ones, checking prescription statuses, facilitating physician and clinic searches, answering frequently asked questions, assisting with IT help desk tasks, and registering new patients.”
“Some specific examples: we saved one of our customers, Intermountain Healthcare, 700 hours in workforce costs within the first two weeks of deployment. And Contra Costa Health Services increased its goal completion rate by 450% by adopting Hyro’s call center & SMS automation.”
Funding/Revenue
In terms of funding/revenue:
“As mentioned before, we have just raised a $20 million Series B funding round, bringing our total funding to $35 million.”
“Since going to market in 2020, we’ve been able to increase our revenue by 100% year over year.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Hyro pursuing? Krush assessed:
“Hyro has primarily focused on the healthcare industry, which encompasses a staggering $1.4 trillion Healthcare IT market ripe with opportunities. We quickly discovered that it is one of the sectors that could benefit most from better technologies, especially due to staffing shortages – 47% of healthcare workers plan to quit the industry by 2025, placing greater demand on excessively strained staff. This pressing need for assistance presents a prime opportunity for automation and conversational AI tools to alleviate up to 85% of mundane tasks, allowing healthcare professionals to concentrate on core responsibilities.”
“Today most of Hyro’s customers are mid-large healthcare providers, health systems, academic medical centers, and hospitals; however, Hyro’s technology is also applicable in other highly-regulated industries, and we are actively planning to broaden its scope to cater to the unique challenges faced by various sectors beyond healthcare.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Hyro from its competition? Krush replied:
“First, unlike rigid intent-based chatbots and IVRs that rely on extensive examples to generate responses, Hyro takes a linguistics and knowledge-based approach. By learning language first and continuously building skills upon that understanding, Hyro delivers usable value to customers up to 60 times faster than its intent-based competitors.”
“Moreover, as data is added or modified across websites, EMRs, databases, APIs, and other sources, Hyro automatically updates its knowledge graph. This ensures that the information provided to patients remains accurate and up to date.”
“Finally, digital health executives who utilize Hyro benefit from complete visibility into the utterances and responses of their AI assistants. This transparency allows them to iterate and refine messaging as needed, a crucial aspect in an industry as sensitive as healthcare.”
“This is in contrast to Large Language Models such as ChatGPT that represent non-transparent black boxes, often delivering wrong outputs—an obvious non-starter in a medical and clinical context.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Hyro’s future company goals? Krush concluded:
“We’re excited to say that we already signed quite a few major strategic partnerships, which we plan to announce in the coming months. In the near future, we aim to partner with other leading organizations to bring conversational AI to all.”
“Also, we’ll continue to enhance our Conversational Intelligence platform, offering real-time alerts, upgrades, and enterprise benchmarking. We will also invest in capturing more granular data points that allow for more robust reporting of trending topics and missing information to allow for optimization insights. Additionally, we will build out more in-depth integrations with key EMRs, CRMs, telephony systems, and more.”
“And, of course, we are committed to continuously enhancing our natural language understanding rates, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of the conversational AI landscape with best-in-class performance.”
