The case for a universal health companion: Our investment in August AI

Despite the numerous AI-led advances in modern healthcare, not nearly enough progress has been made to enhance the end-to-end experience of accessing healthcare for the key stakeholder: the patient. The reality is that healthcare isn't just about those few rushed minutes with a doctor. It's about the anxious days before, the confusion during, and the uncertainty after. This fractured experience creates a dangerous gap where people either delay seeking care, misunderstand their conditions, or fail to follow through on treatment, turning manageable health concerns into preventable complications.

Current health systems manage care as a set of transactions: diagnose, treat, and follow up. However, healthcare-related search trends on Google and ChatGPT indicate that patients want healthcare to be treated as a longitudinal, trust-based problem that keeps them at the centre.

That is where August AI’s digital health companion comes in. It’s built to be the first point of contact with the healthcare system, available 24/7 with zero wait time. By engaging with users in free-flowing natural language, August can’t only gather much more information about them than previously possible but also suggest timely interventions that eliminate patient anxiety, prevent misdiagnoses, and ensure care adherence. 

By partnering with Anuruddh and team August at Seed, we’ve begun to appreciate how incredibly nuanced building trust for such a platform can be. August marries frontier AI techniques inspired by the Mixture of Experts paradigm to serve millions of queries every day with SOTA accuracy, while also solving for personalisation, long-term memory, and trust-inspiring empathy at the user’s end. We’re also firm believers in August’s emphasis on regulatory guardrails and fundamental philosophy of thinking AI and doctors as complements to each other, rather than competitors.

The platform has been growing rapidly, almost entirely via word of mouth, in the last few months, and now serves over 3.5 million users with compelling engagement and retention metrics. August’s medical AI models have already seen real-world patient interaction data equivalent to 230 years of consultation services, poised to grow exponentially as the user base expands across demographics and geographies.

We are excited to be early partners in August’s mission of making healthcare accessible universally, and wish them all the best for the long journey ahead!