Amazon Web Services and the venture capital firm General Catalyst launched a new multiyear agreement on Monday, marking their latest attempt to gain a share of the expanding artificial intelligence market in the healthcare industry.
TakeAway Points:
- General Catalyst and Amazon Web Services announced a collaboration to speed up the creation and application of AI tools for healthcare.
- Aidoc and Commure will be the first companies in General Catalyst’s portfolio to use AWS services to develop new solutions. Financial terms were not revealed.
- “Health system executives who wish to reap the rewards of artificial intelligence now have a simpler method to do so,” stated Dan Sheeran of AWS.
AWS partners with General Catalyst on AI technology
Through the collaboration, General Catalyst portfolio companies will use AWS’ services to build and roll out AI tools for health systems more quickly. Aidoc, which applies AI to medical imaging, and Commure, which automates provider workflows with AI, will be the first two companies to participate.
AWS and General Catalyst declined to disclose the financial details of the agreement.
“Without a strong partner like Amazon and AWS to stand alongside them, to co-develop and support these companies … it’s not going to move as fast as we hope,” Chris Bischoff, head of global health-care investing at General Catalyst, said in an interview.
Health systems are strained in the U.S., with staff burnout, growing labor shortages and razor-thin margins. These challenges often seem enticing for enterprising tech startups to tackle, especially as the multitrillion-dollar healthcare industry dangles the prospect of large financial returns.
Hospitals operate in a complex, technology-weary and highly regulated sector that can be difficult for startups to break into. General Catalyst is hoping to help its companies fast-track the development and go-to-market process by leveraging resources such as computing power from AWS.
Expansion growth
The firm has closed more than 60 digital health deals since 2020, behind only Gaingels and Alumni Ventures, according to a December report from PitchBook. In January 2024, General Catalyst shocked the industry by announcing that its new business, the Health Assurance Transformation Company, planned to acquire an Ohio-based health system—an unprecedented move in venture capital.
General Catalyst’s “deep understanding” of health systems’ financial and operating realities made it an attractive partner for AWS, Dan Sheeran, AWS’ general manager of Healthcare & Life Science, said. Sheeran and Bischoff began outlining the collaboration between the two groups after meeting in London around nine months ago.
AWS also has an established presence in the healthcare sector. The company offers more health- and life-sciences-specific services than any other cloud provider, according to a release, and it inked other high-profile AI partnerships with GE HealthCare, Philips and others last year.
Aidoc and Commure tools
Sheeran said the partnership between General Catalyst and AWS will stretch over several years, but new tools from Aidoc and Commure are coming in 2025. He said Aidoc is exploring how it can use the cloud to tap data modalities across pathology, cardiology, genomics and other molecular information, for instance.
Aidoc and Commure were selected to kick off the collaboration because they have established a product-market fit, are operational and are focused on issues that are a high priority for AWS customers, Sheeran said.
“GC has spent a lot of time thinking about how health systems can transform themselves, and we recognize that it’s not going to be through 1,000 companies, and we need solutions that are really enterprise grade,” Bischoff said. “Amazon shares the same vision, so we are starting with these two.”
Though the partnership between General Catalyst and AWS is still in its early days, the organizations said they believe it will help serve as a way to meet the market’s growing demand for new solutions.
“Health system leaders who want to realize the benefits of AI now have an easier way to accomplish that,” Sheeran said.
