I'm pleased to announce Amigo's strategic partnership with Nortal to bring clinical AI infrastructure and agent engineering to their global network of healthcare clients.
Nortal has spent 25 years leading digital transformation for healthcare systems, governments, and Fortune 500 companies. Together, we're giving healthcare organizations a single path from AI transformation strategy to measurable clinical outcomes.
A big thank you to Elizabeth Kiehner and the Nortal team for their partnership.
Ali Khokhar - I was moved when we first met (over two years ago already?!) and you opened up to me about your mother’s cancer journey. It was clear then how much that experience has shaped you. As a cancer surgeon, I’ve seen time and again how a losing battle with cancer can strain relationships and negatively impact the remaining family members permanently. I admire that you have used your difficult childhood experience to build Amigo and to fundamentally restructure how patients interact with healthcare. I’m also so impressed that the entire Amigo.ai family lives out your founding values.
As someone who cares deeply about the promise (and peril!) that AI holds for healthcare, I feel a lot of gratitude to be able to advise Amigo.ai on the incredible work y’all are doing. Keep up the fantastic work, Amigo family!
My mom passed away from breast cancer when I was 14 years old. What I remember most is how much work it was just to be sick. Referrals were made and forgotten, every new doctor meant starting over, and my family was left to fill in the gaps because the healthcare system never carried that weight for us.
I started Amigo because there are too many stories like mine.
We build, train, and deploy AI agents that can safely deliver care across clinical use cases such as intake and triage, chronic care management, and 24/7 virtual care.
AI is transforming every industry it touches, but healthcare has a higher bar. There's no room for errors or hallucinations, and definitely no second chances with patient lives. That's the problem no one in this space has solved.
We asked ourselves “how do you make AI safe enough to deliver care?” The answer was obvious: clinical agents need to be trained the same way we train doctors.
So we pioneered the industry's first Digital Residency program, training every AI agent against millions of simulated patient cases until they reach a 100% safety pass rate.
And it’s working. In just the last six months, Amigo agents have completed over 3 million patient encounters around the world with zero safety incidents.
I'm proud to announce that Amigo has raised $17M to make healthcare work for everyone, including our $11M Series A led by Madrona with participation from Optum Ventures.
A huge thank you to:
- My incredible team. You chose a hard problem in a hard industry, and you've held yourselves to a standard that most teams wouldn't. I'm proud to be on this journey with you.
- My co-founder John Xing – there's nobody else I'd rather be building this with.
- Our earliest investors (General Catalyst, GSV Ventures, Comma Capital, SV Angel, Coho Deeptech) who bet on us from day one.
We have a real chance to build something better together. For healthcare organizations thinking about how AI can safely expand the reach of their care teams, I'd love to talk.
The biggest startup opportunities are often gated behind the hardest problems.
Many startups build for low-hanging fruit or emulate familiar product playbooks. The rarer founder is one who sees the same uncomfortable challenge as the rest of the market, and yet has the tenacity and vision to go straight at solving it anyway.
Few sectors demand more of that tenacity than healthcare, where AI that operates at the center of patient care carries real regulatory weight, touches deeply sensitive data, and has to meet a very high bar. To succeed here requires earning a level of trust that most software never faces.
That's what drew us to Amigo, and its founders Ali Khokhar and John Xing. They recognized that if AI agents are going to meaningfully change how healthcare is delivered, someone has to clear that bar. That means understanding the clinical context from the inside out and delivering a solution that is as trustworthy as it is effective.
That conviction shaped everything about how they built Amigo, from the digital residency model that trains agents on each organization's patient population before deployment, to the simulation infrastructure that stress-tests for edge cases and adversarial scenarios, not to mention the 100% safety pass rate requirement before any agent sees a real patient. Three million patient encounters and zero safety incidents.
This is what it looks like when the hardest part of the problem becomes the foundation of the product and the ability to democratize personalized care for millions of patients becomes real.
That’s why we’re thrilled to be leading Amigo's $11M Series A at Madrona alongside our friends at Optum Ventures, General Catalyst, and GSV Ventures. You can read more from Karan Mehandru and me below!
https://lnkd.in/gdwQSZfc
My mom passed away from breast cancer when I was 14 years old. What I remember most is how much work it was just to be sick. Referrals were made and forgotten, every new doctor meant starting over, and my family was left to fill in the gaps because the healthcare system never carried that weight for us.
I started Amigo because there are too many stories like mine.
We build, train, and deploy AI agents that can safely deliver care across clinical use cases such as intake and triage, chronic care management, and 24/7 virtual care.
AI is transforming every industry it touches, but healthcare has a higher bar. There's no room for errors or hallucinations, and definitely no second chances with patient lives. That's the problem no one in this space has solved.
We asked ourselves “how do you make AI safe enough to deliver care?” The answer was obvious: clinical agents need to be trained the same way we train doctors.
So we pioneered the industry's first Digital Residency program, training every AI agent against millions of simulated patient cases until they reach a 100% safety pass rate.
And it’s working. In just the last six months, Amigo agents have completed over 3 million patient encounters around the world with zero safety incidents.
I'm proud to announce that Amigo has raised $17M to make healthcare work for everyone, including our $11M Series A led by Madrona with participation from Optum Ventures.
A huge thank you to:
- My incredible team. You chose a hard problem in a hard industry, and you've held yourselves to a standard that most teams wouldn't. I'm proud to be on this journey with you.
- My co-founder John Xing – there's nobody else I'd rather be building this with.
- Our earliest investors (General Catalyst, GSV Ventures, Comma Capital, SV Angel, Coho Deeptech) who bet on us from day one.
We have a real chance to build something better together. For healthcare organizations thinking about how AI can safely expand the reach of their care teams, I'd love to talk.
New post: it's all about the healthcare agents.
What makes agents different than previous types of automation? How do we train agents and monitor them? We talk about the shift from robotic process automation to autonomous agents, and how new challenges emerge as you try to train and deploy these automations
We then go under the hood of Amigo (our sponsoring partner) to walk through how simulation and testing actually works for their agents
If you're interested in the role of clinical agents in healthcare, you'll learn a lot from this one. Full post is here: https://lnkd.in/eFhNGxJR
ViVE 2026 kicked off today and if you're evaluating AI agent vendors this week, we put together a free guide to help: https://lnkd.in/eNGPaedW
There's no shortage of vendors to talk to, but the challenge is figuring out which type of vendor is actually right for your organization.
Task-specific solution? EHR-native extension? AI infrastructure platform? The right answer depends on your use cases and how you see AI scaling over the next two years.
The guide includes 10 questions to ask every vendor, green and red flags to listen for, and a one-page scorecard you can print and use during every conversation.
Come find the Amigo team at ViVE 2026 if you're around this week!
#ViVE2026
Fired up to welcome Jeff Yuen as my new Chief of Staff at Amigo!
Finding the right Chief of Staff is one of the most important hires a founder can make. This is the person in the trenches with you every day as your thought partner and operator across every function.
I've been looking for a very specific type of person to trust with the keys, and Jeff is exactly that guy.
He spent the last 8 years in all corners of healthcare, starting at the biggest institutions in the industry before jumping to startups and building from scratch.
The track record is unreal. He partnered with C-suite execs at Pfizer and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on their highest-priority initiatives, scaled a team from 50 to 200 as a GM at Stellar Health, and led the 0-to-1 buildout across Product, Growth, Ops, and Eng as Chief of Staff at Guaranteed.
Jeff started last week while I was in meetings on the other side of the world, and he was already solving problems and unblocking people by the time I got back. When you hire the right Chief of Staff, they don't need you in the room.
That's who you hand the keys to.
Excited to have you on the team Jeff! 🚀
We just made our youngest hire ever at Amigo and she's genuinely built different.
Meet Rythama Chevendra, our newest Agent Engineer!
She's currently wrapping up her senior year of college remotely while working with us full time because she couldn't wait to start building.
Most people graduate college with two or three internships under their belt. Rythama has six.
Each time, she chased harder problems. She built deep learning models that classify Covid-19 radiology scans, deployed ML systems for hospitals, and co-led the shift to Agentic AI at CGI before most people even knew what MCP was.
When I asked Rythama why she chose to go full time at a startup before finishing school, she said she always prioritizes practicing in industry and that she's learning more at Amigo than she ever could in a traditional school environment.
She's not afraid to roll up her sleeves and build alongside engineers who have years on her, and she makes it look easy.
Welcome to the team, Rythama. We're lucky to have you!
A candidate's "why" is something most companies forget to hire for.
Erik Poldroo is joining Amigo as our Behavioral Health Lead, and his "why" tells the story better than I can.
Erik is a former NCAA student-athlete who lived the pressure of high-level competition and the lack of mental health support that comes with it.
That experience stuck with him, so he co-founded The Zone, a mental health platform designed to support student-athletes. Under his leadership in business development and customer success, he scaled it to 7,500+ student-athletes across 200+ teams in the NCAA.
What started as a personal mission landed him speaking engagements at Yale School of Management and features in Sports Business Journal and Sportico. It even caught the attention of US Olympic Gold Medalist Justin Gatlin who partnered with him to bring mental health support to track and field athletes.
You can always tell if someone's "why" is genuine by looking at what they've poured themselves into. Erik has dedicated years to bridging care gaps in behavioral health and wholeheartedly cares about expanding access to those who need it most.
I couldn't be more excited to have him leading this. Welcome to the team, Erik!
Just came back from a week-long offsite in Barbados with the entire Amigo team 🌴
First half of the week was all business. We went deep on the plan for 2026 and even had Dr. Jay Shah (our Chief Medical Advisor) fly in to hang out with us and do some team building.
For the second half, we were fully offline. R&R, no work talk, and just hanging out together as a team.
That's when you really see what makes this group special. It goes without saying that each member of the team is talented and hard working, but the secret sauce is that they actually... like each other.
The value of that can't be understated.
It's an incredibly exciting time for healthcare and we have a big year ahead of us. Building something meaningful in this space is going to take a lot more than just smart people.
The hardest problems will get solved by people who genuinely trust one another and have each other's backs, so a week like this pays dividends all year.
