Vocca raises $5.5M to bring AI phone assistants to healthcare

Healthcare-focused voice AI startup Vocca has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to help overburdened medical practices manage their phone lines more efficiently. The round was co-led by Speedinvest and firstminute capital, with participation from Kima Ventures, FJ Labs, Sequoia Scout (Roxane Varza), and prominent angels including the founders of Alan, Datadog, Deel, Jellysmack, and Mistral.

Vocca’s platform uses AI-powered voice agents to answer and make phone calls on behalf of healthcare providers, booking appointments, sending reminders, handling patient queries, and integrating directly with medical scheduling software. It’s designed to tackle a long-standing problem in healthcare: the administrative strain and financial cost of poor phone communication.

Despite the rise of digital tools, the telephone remains the primary channel for booking medical appointments, accounting for over 70 percent of all patient scheduling, according to industry estimates. But healthcare phone systems are chronically overloaded.

Vocca’s AI agents are purpose-built for healthcare and trained on medical vocabulary and specialist workflows. The startup claims its agents are capable of understanding and resolving nuanced requests from patients, while directly interfacing with existing appointment and EHR systems.

Founded in 2024 by Eliott Hoffenberg and Hugo Danet, Vocca is part of a new wave of AI-first startups targeting operational inefficiencies in healthcare, one of the world’s most complex and regulation-heavy industries.

With fresh capital in hand, the company plans to triple its team and expand across both the U.S. and Europe, aiming to equip 10,000 healthcare providers by 2026. Vocca also plans to develop specialty-specific workflows across disciplines like dermatology, dentistry, gynecology, and mental health.

Privacy and regulatory compliance are core to Vocca’s product. The platform is fully compliant with GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2, ensuring it can meet the high bar of data protection required in medical settings.

Investors backing Vocca see the company as not only a time-saver, but a way to modernise the patient experience and address staffing shortages in primary care.

Vocca’s raise comes amid increasing investor interest in AI tools that support healthcare operations, rather than just diagnostics or clinical decision-making. Startups automating administrative tasks, such as Suki, Nabla, Ribbon, and Ambience Healthcare, are gaining traction as hospitals and clinics look to improve efficiency without adding headcount.

In that context, Vocca’s positioning around AI reception fills a critical gap in the patient journey: the very first interaction. By turning phone conversations into structured workflows, it promises both cost savings and better patient outcomes, a compelling value proposition for overburdened healthcare systems worldwide.