Delhi-based Health Advise Chatbot Visit Receives Funding from Salesforce Chief Scientist Richard Socher

Visit, an artificial intelligence (AI) driven Chatbot for health advice, which already counts Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Snapdeal founders - Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal, as its backers, has again roped in an another popular figure as its investor as it received an undisclosed amount of funding from Richard Socher, the Chief Scientist at Salesforce.

Socher, a Stanford alumni and a leader in the field of AI based in Silicon Valley, US, has invested in his personal capacity in Visit. Visit is Socher's third investment so far as prior to this he has invested in Israel-based Zebra Medical Vision, a medical imaging insights platform, and Luka, a software development company based in San Francisco, California.

With Socher joining Delhi-based Visit as an investor, Anurag Prasad, co-founder of Visit, said, "Richard's massive expertise in the field of AI will help us strengthen our product and machine learning efforts by leaps and bounds."



Richard Socher, on this investment, said, "The visit app is one of the most exciting combinations of human and artificial intelligence, helping people get fast, accurate and affordable advice on their health."

Founded in 2016 by BITS Pilani alumni Anurag, Shashvat Tripathi, Chetan Anand and Vaibhav Singh, Visit Internet Service Pvt. Ltd is headquartered in Delhi and offers personal healthcare assistant/chatbot for health queries and also provides a tele-health platform to connect to healthcare specialists. It connects users with over 2,000 doctors and specialists for treatments, prescriptions and counselling.

"Users engage with the Visit Chatbot by describing their symptoms and the bot poses a series of questions to predict the most probable diagnosis," explained Anurag.

In April, this year, the startup had grabbed undisclosed funding from Biz Stone, who is one of the founders of microblogging site Twitter.

According to a survey report by Oracle, it was revealed that about 80 per cent of the companies surveyed are interested in making use of chatbots within a period of next 4 years so as to take their customer service to another level.

Besides being the chief scientist at Salesforce, a global CRM solutions provider, Richard Socher was also the founder and CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind that was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Metamind is an automatic image recognition powered by AI.

Recent Chatbot Startups Activities

In March this year, mobile handset manufacturer Micromax had invested in an AI-enabled Chatbot startup 'One Labs', which has developed a chatbot similar to Apple's Siri and Google Assistant.

In July 2017 Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) acquired a chatbot startup called Joe Hukum, which too was based out of Gurgaon. Later, in the same year, an another Gurgaon based AI chatbot startup iDelivr got acquired by Phonon Communications.

The year 2017 was dominated by various chatbot activities as Amazon launched chatbot tools for developers, to help them build chat features into their own app while Microsoft launched India-specific chatbot called Ruuh, which later got wind up by the company however.

[Top Featured Image - Visit co-founders | Via - Visit@ Facebook]

News sourced from Economic Times

Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Invests In Delhi's Health Chatbot Startup 'Visit'

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has invested in a Delhi-based Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot "Visit" which is the brainchild of students from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani in Rajasthan. Stone made this investment in his personal capacity.

Started in 2016 by Anurag Prasad, Vaibhav Singh, Shashvat Tripathi and Chetan Anand, "Visit" is an AI-powered chatbot for health advice learning from, and assisting, existing doctors.

"People interact with the 'Visit' chatbot by sharing some symptoms. The bot follows up with relevant questions to collect more symptoms and risk factors (is the person hypertensive, diabetic, a smoker). This triaging is conversational and low stress," Stone wrote in a blog post on Medium on Sunday.

"Visit" plans to democratize healthcare by shrinking the shortage of doctors using AI.

"In India, for every doctor there are 2,000 patients lined up in-clinics -- waiting for hours.

"Accessibility to quality health advice is an overwhelming problem in a country with over 200 million people affected by lifestyle problems like stress, chronic conditions, obesity, skin conditions, and more. This is where the technology approach by a 'Visit' comes in," Stone informed.

"Visit" chats conclude with patients being more educated about possible conditions, symptoms, and treatments.

The chatbot is trained using over 20,000 probabilistic relationships between variables such as conditions, symptoms, risk factors, past history and more.

Once a probable medical condition is determined, "Visit" connects the patient to one of over 2,000 health specialists all across India via video, phone or chat so the right treatment can be put into place.

"But it doesn't end there. People can stay in touch with their practitioner over chat for follow-up. The objective is not to replace the doctor but to help practitioners in an assistive way by regular patient check-ins and reminders related to their care plan," Stone noted.

"Investing in Visit is my small way of contributing to a future where AI is seen as a positive enhancement of humanity that really does improve lives," he added.

To recall, before this Biz Stone had invested in an another Indian startup called Lookup, a Bengaluru-based free and secure messaging app that connects shoppers with local businesses, in May 2015.

The above news was first reported in ET Tech.

Recent Chatbot Startups Activities

Last month, mobile handset manufacturer Micromax had invested in an AI-enabled Chatbot startup 'One Labs', which has developed chat bot like Apple's Siri and Google Assistant.

In July 2017 Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) acquired a chatbot startup called Joe Hukum, which too was based out of Gurgaon. Later, in the same year, an another Gurgaon based AI chatbot startup iDelivr got acquired by Phonon Communications.

The year 2017 was dominated by various chatbot activities as Amazon launched chatbot tools for developers, to help them build chat features into their own app while Microsoft launched India-specific chatbot called Ruuh, which later got wind up by the company however.

According to a survey report by Oracle, it was revealed that about 80 per cent of the companies surveyed are interested in making use of chatbots within a period of next 4 years so as to take their customer service to another level.

Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Invests In Delhi's Health Chatbot Startup 'Visit'

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has invested in a Delhi-based Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot "Visit" which is the brainchild of students from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani in Rajasthan. Stone made this investment in his personal capacity.

Started in 2016 by Anurag Prasad, Vaibhav Singh, Shashvat Tripathi and Chetan Anand, "Visit" is an AI-powered chatbot for health advice learning from, and assisting, existing doctors.

"People interact with the 'Visit' chatbot by sharing some symptoms. The bot follows up with relevant questions to collect more symptoms and risk factors (is the person hypertensive, diabetic, a smoker). This triaging is conversational and low stress," Stone wrote in a blog post on Medium on Sunday.

"Visit" plans to democratize healthcare by shrinking the shortage of doctors using AI.

"In India, for every doctor there are 2,000 patients lined up in-clinics -- waiting for hours.

"Accessibility to quality health advice is an overwhelming problem in a country with over 200 million people affected by lifestyle problems like stress, chronic conditions, obesity, skin conditions, and more. This is where the technology approach by a 'Visit' comes in," Stone informed.

"Visit" chats conclude with patients being more educated about possible conditions, symptoms, and treatments.

The chatbot is trained using over 20,000 probabilistic relationships between variables such as conditions, symptoms, risk factors, past history and more.

Once a probable medical condition is determined, "Visit" connects the patient to one of over 2,000 health specialists all across India via video, phone or chat so the right treatment can be put into place.

"But it doesn't end there. People can stay in touch with their practitioner over chat for follow-up. The objective is not to replace the doctor but to help practitioners in an assistive way by regular patient check-ins and reminders related to their care plan," Stone noted.

"Investing in Visit is my small way of contributing to a future where AI is seen as a positive enhancement of humanity that really does improve lives," he added.

To recall, before this Biz Stone had invested in an another Indian startup called Lookup, a Bengaluru-based free and secure messaging app that connects shoppers with local businesses, in May 2015.

The above news was first reported in ET Tech.

Recent Chatbot Startups Activities

Last month, mobile handset manufacturer Micromax had invested in an AI-enabled Chatbot startup 'One Labs', which has developed chat bot like Apple's Siri and Google Assistant.

In July 2017 Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) acquired a chatbot startup called Joe Hukum, which too was based out of Gurgaon. Later, in the same year, an another Gurgaon based AI chatbot startup iDelivr got acquired by Phonon Communications.

The year 2017 was dominated by various chatbot activities as Amazon launched chatbot tools for developers, to help them build chat features into their own app while Microsoft launched India-specific chatbot called Ruuh, which later got wind up by the company however.

According to a survey report by Oracle, it was revealed that about 80 per cent of the companies surveyed are interested in making use of chatbots within a period of next 4 years so as to take their customer service to another level.

VISIT Gets Seed Funding from Technology Company MapmyIndia

[caption id="attachment_106292" align="aligncenter" width="701"] VISIT's Team[/caption]

Delhi based VISIT, an on-demand healthcare service provider, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed round funding from MapmyIndia, a marquee Technology Company based out of New Delhi.

VISIT allows users to get their health queries answered in few minutes with their free text-a-doctor service - ‘Q’. This allows the users to ask all health related questions to doctors with just a real time text message. ‘Q’ is designed to be a health-based Q&A platform that works with a personal conversation between you and your physician. It’s an easy way to get a first opinion from a doctor. If the user requires a treatment or counselling, ‘Q’ helps connect the user with a specialist over Video or Phone call within 30 minutes.  

“With the new funding, we plan on investing heavily in improving our technology. We are also aiming at increasing the number of doctors and counsellors on the app to 500 over the next 3 months. The vision is to bring m-Health to a billion Indians over the next 5 years. No matter where you are, you should have access to quality healthcare at just a tap.” said Vaibhav Singh, Co-founder, VISIT.

“We have been in search of supporting a team whose mission was to make quality healthcare easily available to everyone and who had the capability to execute on this mission. In VISIT we found both and are extremely excited to support them achieve their mission. ” said Rohan Verma, Director of MapmyIndia.

VISIT was co-founded by four graduates from BITS Pilani — Anurag Prasad, Vaibhav Singh, Chetan Anand and Shashvat Tripathi to solve the various problems in the delivery of healthcare today – booking an OPD appointment, travel time, in-clinic waiting, inability to get in-house doctor visits and privacy concerns/stigmas associated with visiting particular types of specialists like psychologists and dermatologists etc.

“We realised that for most of the 30Million+ working Indians visiting a doctor during weekdays was a big pain point. Unsurprisingly, most of us consult a doctor only when the condition is serious which diminishes the whole concept of preventive healthcare and timely follow ups. There is no single fix for Indian healthcare, but its hard to imagine a world where technology that connects patients to high-quality care (anytime, anywhere) isn’t a crucial part of the solution.” said Anurag Prasad, Co-founder, VISIT.

Currently the platform empanels therapists, general physicians, dermatologists and nutritionists for paid specialist consultations over Video/Phone call.

Talking about the specialists associated with VISIT, Chetan Anand, Co-founder, VISIT, said, “We make sure that the empanelment of doctors is carried out through a strict verification process thereby providing a reliable service to our customers. On an average only 1 out of 5 doctors make it through our stringent quality checks.”

Currently VISIT app is available for Android users as “getvisitapp” on Playstore and on Web.