HOPPR just pulled off a diagnostic dropkick on the AI healthcare industry, and it landed with a $31.5M Series A that doesn’t just raise the bar, it turns the whole radiology floor into a launchpad.
This isn’t some play-pretend pivot with AI taped to the homepage. HOPPR, founded in 2019, was built on a decade-old memo from Dr. Khan M. Siddiqui, MD, the kind of physician-executive hybrid you don’t clone in labs. Faculty at Johns Hopkins. Healthcare platform lead at Microsoft. Founder of higi, which exited via Babylon Health’s $4.2B SPAC deal. And now? Chairman and CEO of a company compressing medical AI development timelines from years to months like it’s a zip file.
Alongside Dr. Siddiqui, there’s Dr. Oliver Chen, MD, MIT undergrad, Harvard Med, UCLA-trained radiologist, UCSF neuroradiology fellow, Microsoft alum, and founder of ilumihealth (sold to Fosun Pharma). Pair that with Robert Bakos, the former higi CTO who helped scale RIS/PACS tech at Merge Healthcare (aka IBM Watson Imaging), and you’ve got a founding team that doesn’t just speak the language of medical imaging, they invented dialects.
Let’s not forget the rest of the ensemble: Dr. William Boonn, MD, Dr. Woojin Kim, MD, Keith Corbin, Ted Schwab, Dr. Bradley Erickson, MD, Ruby Gill, Ph.D., and Jennifer Harris. This isn’t a team, it’s a surgical unit fused with a dev shop running on jet fuel.
The result? A platform that lets medical imaging vendors and developers fine-tune and validate AI models in a locked-down, regulation-ready sandbox. It’s secure. It’s compliant. And it’s built to take images with 65,000 shades of gray, because real-life diagnostics don’t work in cartoon color palettes. Grace, HOPPR’s multimodal foundation model, trains on over a petabyte of anonymized medical imaging and can learn across every modality, CT, MRI, X-ray, you name it.
With offices from Chicago to Sacramento, HOPPR is giving developers the infrastructure to go from napkin sketch to deployment in record time. The Series A round, led by Kivu Ventures and Greycroft with strong support from PSG Equity, Morningside Capital, Fortitude Ventures, and a returning Health2047, is more than a funding milestone, it’s an MRI of what’s possible when deep tech meets deeper clinical insight.
HOPPR isn’t hopping trends. They’re setting the frequency. In a $60B medical imaging market, they’ve turned burnout and bandwidth issues into a launch signal, and the echoes are just beginning to hit the ecosystem.
The foundation model future? It’s already being fine-tuned.
