Diligent brings in $30M to put Moxi in hospitals

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Diligent Robotics co-founders Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu with Moxi. | Source: Diligent Robotics

Diligent Robotics brought in $30 million in Series B funding, according to an announcement the company made today. The company’s flagship product, Moxi, is a robot that performs tasks for nurses so they can spend more time with patients. 

“We are proud to have the full support of our past investors and welcome our new partners who joined during our Series B raise,” Dr. Andrea Thomaz, co-founder of Diligent Robotics, said. “This new round of funding will help us scale the company to meet the incredible demand for our healthcare service robot. Thanks to the support of our investors and the Diligent team, we are focused on expanding automated support for clinical teams so nurses and clinicians can focus on tasks that matter most, patient care.”

Tiger Global led the funding round, which also included Diligent’s previous investors True Ventures, DNX Venture, Ubiquity Ventures, E14 Fund, Next Coast Ventures, Boom Capital and Gaingels. New investors in the company include Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures. Two Moxi robots were first deployed at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA in September 2021. 

The company’s last round of funding was a $10M Series A round in 2020. Diligent has raised a total of $45.9M to date (source: Crunchbase).

“Diligent Robotics’ participation in the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program led to the exploration of our team testing this solution with our clinical teams,” Dr. David Marshall, chief nursing executive at Cedars-Sinai, said. “Using the robot to relieve front-line health care workers from point-to-point delivery and retrieval tasks has been successful in our original launch. Staff members have told me that gives them more time for direct patient care.”

Diligent first unveiled Moxi in 2018 as a collaborative robot that could assist in hospitals by delivering supplies, medications or lab samples. Today Moxi is able to deliver teleboxes, manage the “do not tube” medications and pick up patient’s personal items. 

To call on Moxi, nurses can simply text or call from a hospital issued phone, and the robot will respond within five minutes with a status update and an estimated arrival time. While Moxi was created to make hospitals more efficient, it also aims to improve morale. Moxi uses AI, machine learning technology and social engineering to interact with people. Moxi waves when it sees someone new, and even poses for selfies.

“We started implementing Moxi into our clinical workflows in December and planned on going through a trial phase to determine if the technology would be helpful to our staff,” Cody Blankenship, vice president of performance improvement at Mary Washington Healthcare, said. “Right away, we could see the impact Moxi made on the efficiency of our staff and how morale immediately increased. We were so impressed with what Moxi took off our team’s hands, we chose to add even more robots to our fleet.”

Diligent plans to use the most recent round of funding to optimize supply chain and design teams for faster deployments. The company also hopes to enhance interoperability and further integrations with existing hospital infrastructure, electronic health records and clinical communications.