Startup Olive AI Inc. has secured $400 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation to broaden the adoption of its robotic process automation platform, which helps healthcare providers automate repetitive manual tasks to free up resources for other activities.

Olive announced the funding round today. The investment was led by Vista Equity Partners with participation from Base10 Advancement Initiative and Tiger Global Management. Including the new round, Olive has raised more than $800 million in funding to date.

Robotic process automation platforms use artificial intelligence to observe how employees perform a given task in an application and, over time, learn to carry out the task automatically. Olive has applied this approach to automating tasks specific to the healthcare sector, such as ordering new medical supplies. Reducing the number of manually performed steps involved in such workflows not only frees up time for employees but also reduces the risk of human error.

The startup says its edge over other RPA products is that its platform is specifically optimized for healthcare applications. The platform collects nearly 20 times more contextual data as it performs tasks in healthcare applications than is strictly needed to complete each chore. Its AI algorithms analyze this data to learn ways of carrying out the work more efficiently. Overall, Olive says, it processes 28 times more information than the Hubble Space Telescope collects in a week.

Another area where the startup says its platform stands out is reliability, a particularly key requirement in the healthcare sector. Olive says its platform performs tasks with an average reliability of 99.8% across customer environments thanks to a built-in error detection mechanism called Omega. According to the startup, the mechanism can flag potential problems with the platform’s AI algorithms up to three days in advance and in the process finds potential ways to increase their efficiency.

Olive’s go-to-market strategy involves providing its platform not just as a standalone software product but also as part of what it refers to as an “AI-as-a-service” offering. The healthcare providers for which the startup developed the platform don’t always possess the technical know-how to deploy an RPA platform. To address that challenge, Olive provides technical assistance to customers as part of its AI-as-a-service offering, including help with identifying manual tasks and implementing automation workflows to streamline them.

This strategy has proven successful for the startup. Olive says that its platform is currently running at more than 900 hospitals in most U.S. states, including more than 20 of the top health systems. That’s up from about 600 hospitals last December, when the startup raised its previous funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation.

“Olive’s widespread adoption as mission-critical tech makes it clear that now is the time for the healthcare industry to pull into the lead position for enterprise AI adoption,” said Olive Chief Executive Officer Sean Lane.

Using the latest $400 million investment announced today, Olive plans to double its workforce to about 1,600 employees by year’s end and build more product capabilities.

The startup has already been investing considerable resources in expanding its feature set. In conjunction with the funding round, Olive said today that it’s rolling out Olive Helps, a new desktop application designed to help hospital staff to more easily access information from health systems. Olive also introduced a development kit that enables healthcare companies to create integrations for connecting their software to Olive Helps.

Olive’s $4 billion valuation shows that the startup and its investors believe demand for RPA will increase significantly in the healthcare sector over the coming year. If that proves to be the case, the more established players in the RPA segment can likely be expected to expand their own healthcare capabilities, perhaps through acquisitions.

Olive’s newly announced $400 million round gives the startup resources to make acquisitions of its own to advance its product roadmap. The launch of the Olive Helps application for accessing healthcare information suggests that Olive may be looking to expand beyond RPA to adjacent segments. It could potentially accelerate this effort by buying smaller startups with existing products in the areas it targets.

Rohan D’Souza, chief product officer of Olive AI, recently discussed administrative problems of healthcare and what the company is doing to try to solve them in a recent conversation on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio:

Image: Olive