Hippocratic AI announced a $53 million funding round on March 18. It also announced the launch of its first product for phase-three safety testing — a staffing marketplace where health systems can hire generative AI agents. Plans call for the generative AI agents to work with patients to handle tasks that are low-risk and nondiagnostic.

The company aims for its AI agents to help solve the shortage of nurses, social workers and nutritionists in the US and worldwide.

Hippocratic AI’s total funding is $120 million with this round. Total valuation is $500 million.

Funding will help pay for phase-three safety testing and further develop the product. The AI agents won’t be allowed to speak with patients unsupervised until after this testing is complete, the company said.

The round was co-led by Premji Invest and General Catalyst.

“Since the founding of Hippocratic AI a year ago, the company trained its foundational model, achieved a key safety threshold, identified novel use cases to solve the healthcare staffing crisis and established partnerships with 40 health systems, payors, and digital health companies,” Hemant Taneja, CEO and managing director at General Catalyst, said in a press release.

Phase-three testing will require testing of the AI agents to be completed by 5,000 licensed nurses, 500 licensed physicians and the company’s health system partners.

According to the company, the AI agents’ initial roles will include “chronic care management, post-discharge follow-up for specific conditions such as congestive heart failure and kidney disease, as well as wellness and social determinants of health surveys, health risk assessments and pre-operative outreach.”

The Palo Alto, California-based company posted an example of its agent in action. The company was also mentioned in a keynote speech by Jensen Huang, CEO of AI chip maker Nvidia.

In earlier phases of testing, 1,002 US licenses nurses and 130 US licenses physicians were asked to act as patients and speak to the AI agents in a variety of use cases, the company said. The nurses and doctors then assessed the product.

“When we started the company, we prioritized safety as our top value. This is why we named the company after the physician’s Hippocratic Oath and made the tagline ‘Do no harm,’” Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, said in a press release. “This has been our guiding principle since the company’s founding.”