AWS and General Catalyst partner to hurry development

Amazon Web Services and enterprise capital firm General Catalyst on Monday announced a recent multiyear partnership of their latest push to carve out a bit of health-care’s growing artificial intelligence market. 

Through the collaboration, General Catalyst portfolio firms will use AWS’ services to construct 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 probably be the primary two firms to participate.

AWS and General Catalyst declined to reveal the financial details of the agreement.

“And not using a strong partner like Amazon and AWS to face alongside them, to co-develop and support these firms … it is not going to maneuver as fast as we hope,” Chris Bischoff, head of worldwide health-care investing at General Catalyst, told CNBC in an interview. 

Health systems are strained within 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 because the multitrillion-dollar health-care industry dangles the prospect of enormous financial returns. 

Hospitals operate in a posh, technology-weary and highly-regulated sector that will be difficult for startups to interrupt into. General Catalyst is hoping to assist its firms fast-track the event and go-to-market process by leveraging resources comparable to computing power from AWS.  

General Catalyst is not any stranger to taking big swings in health care. 

The firm has closed greater than 60 digital health deals since 2020, behind only Gaingels and Alumni Ventures, in response to a December report from PitchBook. In January 2024, General Catalyst shocked the industry by announcing that its recent business, the Health Assurance Transformation Company, planned to amass an Ohio-based health system — an unprecedented move in enterprise capital. 

General Catalyst’s “deep understanding” of health systems’ financial and operating realities made it a pretty partner for AWS, Dan Sheeran, AWS’ general manager of Healthcare & Life Science, told CNBC. Sheeran and Bischoff began outlining the collaboration between the 2 groups after meeting in London around nine months ago.   

AWS also has a longtime presence within the health-care sector. The corporate offers more health- and life-sciences-specific services than every other cloud provider, in response to a release, and it inked other high-profile AI partnerships with GE HealthCare, Philips and others last 12 months. 

Sheeran said the partnership between General Catalyst and AWS will stretch over several years, but recent tools from Aidoc and Commure are coming in 2025. He said Aidoc is exploring how it might probably use the cloud to tap data modalities across pathology, cardiology, genomics and other molecular information, as an illustration. 

Aidoc and Commure were chosen to kick off the collaboration because they’ve established a product-market fit, are operational and are focused on issues which can be a high priority for AWS customers, Sheeran said.

“GC has spent quite a lot of time excited about how health systems can transform themselves, and we recognize that it is not going to be through 1,000 firms, and we want solutions which can be really enterprise grade,” Bischoff said. “Amazon shares the identical vision, so we’re starting with these two.”  

Though the partnership between General Catalyst and AWS remains to be in its early days, the organizations said they imagine it should help function a option to meet the market’s growing demand for brand spanking new solutions. 

“Health system leaders who want to understand the advantages of AI now have a better option to accomplish that,” Sheeran said.