UC Berkeley spin-out builds AI that learns from real clinical decision-making
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Knit Health, a health tech company spun out of University of California, Berkeley developing collective clinical intelligence, today launched out of stealth with $11.6 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Uncork Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures and the pre-seed round was led by Moxxie Ventures, with participation from Coalition Operators. The funding will accelerate deeper development and deployment of Knit Health’s Large Clinical Behavior Model (LCBM) across health systems, helping optimize clinical operations and elevate patient care.
Much of AI in healthcare today relies on large language models primarily trained on text or published literature to support clinical operations and decision-making. This approach overlooks collective clinical intelligence: the patterns of real-world decision-making and coordination embedded in referral habits, scheduling practices, and the informal ways clinicians navigate complex institutions. This knowledge is what ultimately drives better outcomes, ensuring patients are routed to the right care, at the right time, with the right information.
Knit Health is addressing this gap as it builds its LCBM trained on Truveta EMR Data from over 130 million patients across 30 U.S. health systems. Using deep reinforcement learning, causal inference, and behavioral cloning, the model learns directly from clinician decision-making patterns and applies that insight across operational and care delivery workflows – enabling providers to deliver faster, more informed, patient-specific care pathways.
“Much of what matters most in medicine isn’t written in textbooks, it’s learned through experience with time and navigating the healthcare system,” said Jonathan Kolstad, Co-founder and CEO of Knit Health. “Across millions of patient journeys, clinicians develop patterns for what to do next and when. Knit learns from those real-world decisions, transforming collective clinical experience into intelligence that improves how the system works.”
Knit Health’s approach differs from traditional systems in several key ways:
- Building to a behavioral world model: Knit’s LCBM learns from observed sequences of clinical decisions, enabling it to reflect how care actually unfolds in practice rather than producing probabilistic text.
- Health system-specific: Knit fine-tunes to each health system’s practice patterns, capacity constraints, and referral dynamics, allowing it to integrate seamlessly into existing operations and deliver measurable impact from the outset.
- Infrastructure layer to drive health systems: Knit sits beneath every routing decision, every discharge prediction, every care team allocation, every referral, and eventually every clinical workflow that touches a patient. This drives intelligence across the systems.
“Knit Health is creating a new approach to AI. Unlike traditional models, it learns and evolves from real human behavior and can be applied across complex systems,” said Tripp Jones, General Partner at Uncork Capital. “This approach redefines how intelligence is captured and scaled, opening entirely new possibilities for AI-driven innovation in healthcare.”
“The hardest challenge in healthcare isn’t knowing what good care looks like, it’s delivering it consistently for every patient,” said Navid Farzad, Managing Partner at Frist Cressey Ventures. “Knit Health’s model embeds the best clinical intelligence directly into the workflow, helping clinicians make better decisions faster and more consistently. At scale, this will improve patient outcomes and transform clinical operations across health systems.”
Knit Health is built with full HIPAA compliance – rigorous governance, bias testing, and continuous monitoring to ensure guidance that patients and providers can trust. The company is partnering with health systems to deploy its initial models for triage, patient flow, and quality improvement. Through these collaborations, Knit aims to become the irreplaceable infrastructure layer that every clinical decision runs on.
Learn more about Knit Health here.
About Knit Health
Founded in 2025, Knit Health is building AI that captures collective clinical intelligence to become the infrastructure for better healthcare. Knit Health’s founders are a team of University of California, Berkeley researchers and academics and together, they bring deep expertise across behavioral economics, causal inference, generative Al, and healthcare. Knit Health was born from their shared vision to harness the capabilities of generative AI in a way that reflects the human behavior and collective intelligence that defines medicine.
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