UnityAI builds AI agents for autonomous healthcare operations, centered primarily around scheduling and coordination. Many of those agents are voice-enabled, handling everything from referral queues and rescheduling and load-balancing to pre-visit prep and post-visit surveys. The company is led by CEO and Co-Founder Edmund Jackson. Pulse 2.0 interviewed UnityAI CEO & Co-Founder Edmund Jackson to learn more.
Background and Path to Healthcare
Asked about his background, Jackson shared:
I grew up in South Africa, coding and playing with math. This eventually led to a PhD in Bayesian statistics from Cambridge and a first career in quantitative finance in London and offshore. Fortunately for me, I found meaning in healthcare, working first at HCA Healthcare as Chief Data Scientist and then co-founding UnityAI.
Origins of the Company
On how the idea for UnityAI came together, Jackson explained:
UnityAI germinated when I realized that generative AI was going to be really important in healthcare, that nobody had the first clue how, but that I had a good chance of forming a team that could figure it out. We are founded on the firm belief that operations are the actual opportunity in healthcare: both a significant problem, but also addressable. We explored several product realizations of that idea, and the market told us that AI agents for scheduling operations was the correct one.
A Favorite Memory
Asked about his favorite memory since starting the company, Jackson reflected:
Listening to one of our agents patiently and correctly handling a very complex patient interaction and having that patient be delighted was the best! In that moment, I knew that our stuff both worked and was meaningful.
Core Products and Features
On UnityAI’s core products and features, Jackson detailed:
We enable autonomous operations at our clients primarily through AI agents, often voice-enable. Today, these agents wrap the complete patient scheduling experience, including working referral queues, de-novo scheduling, rescheduling, cancellations, Q&A, pre-visit prep, and post-visit surveys. They both answer inbound calls, as well as make outbound calls.
The patient experiences a zero-wait, always-available service that knows them and can facilitate ready access to services.
Healthcare Challenges and Overcoming Them
Asked about challenges in healthcare that have affected UnityAI’s trajectory and how the company overcame them, Jackson outlined:
UnityAI exists to help our clients overcome the core operational scalability problems of healthcare.
The ‘last mile’ of many healthcare operations is an interaction with a person, patient, or staff member, around whom there is no standard interface of a portal/app/API. As a result, we resort to people speaking to other people, and healthcare has not been able to scale these functions beyond contact centers filled with people holding repetitive, yet subtly unique, conversations. Expensive, low quality, and hard to improve.
LLMs and VoiceAI remove that limitation, enabling scale at last. Our agents are based on a deep understanding of both the patient/employee and client practice, enabling them to hold complex, unique conversations at scale.
Technology Evolution Since Launch
On how the company’s technology has evolved since launching, Jackson described:
The core is a comprehensive clinical data layer and abstraction has been maintained throughout.
The constant dynamic is the evolution of AI itself: from genAI to LLMs, to reasoning LLMs, to voice AI, to agents, to open-loop agents. With each evolution, we’re able to create more valuable products and categories for our clients.
Significant Milestones
Asked about UnityAI’s most significant milestones, Jackson highlighted:
Our millionth patient conversation was a wonderful milestone earlier this year.
Customer Success Stories
On specific customer success stories, Jackson noted:
One of our clients doubled the operating profit at clinics where they deploy our agents. This is a combination effect: lower cost patient interaction, comprehensive patient conversion, meaningfully lower patient no-show rates, higher recapture rates and higher clinician utilization.
Funding and Revenue Traction
Asked about total funding to date and revenue metrics demonstrating market traction, Jackson clarified:
We have raised $15 million to date based on several million dollars of revenue generated across over 300 sites of care in the US.
Total Addressable Market
On the total addressable market for UnityAI, Jackson observed:
With approximately 4 billion annual encounters in ambulatory and outpatient segments, we believe in a TAM of $5 billion.
Competitive Differentiation
Asked what differentiates UnityAI from the competition, Jackson emphasized:
We envisage, and are built from the studs out as healthcare first , healthcare. Our ability to create value for our clients derives from our teams’ real experience of healthcare operations and optimization, as well as our services and problem solving approach. We are not just a cute voice that answers the phone.
Future Goals
On the company’s future goals, Jackson shared:
We are building new agents to autonomize more middle- and back-office functions in clinics, as well as extend to new ambulatory service lines.
Final Thoughts on the Series A and the Broader Landscape
Asked if there was anything else to share about UnityAI, the Series A round, or the broader landscape, Jackson concluded:
AI is probably the most exciting and challenging technical innovation of our lifetimes. At UnityAI, we believe deeply in applying this for good by facilitating access and reducing inefficiency and cost in healthcare.
