AI startup Knit Health raises $11.6M in seed funding. Last Updated: 12 May 2026 Co-founder of JustAINews Key Points * Knit Health raised $11.6 million in seed funding, backed by Uncork Capital, Frist Cressey Ventures, Moxxie Ventures, and Coalition Operators. * The UC Berkeley spin-out trains its AI on real clinical decision patterns across 130 million patients in 30 U.S. health systems. * Knit Health aims to build an AI infrastructure layer that runs beneath every routing, discharge, and care allocation decision in hospitals. Credits: JustAINews.com Knit Health, a startup spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, has raised $11.6 million in seed funding and stepped out of stealth. The company is building AI trained on real clinical behavior rather than textbooks or published research. Its founders, a team of Berkeley researchers and academics led by CEO Jonathan Kolstad, call the technology a Large Clinical Behavior Model, or LCBM. In plain terms, it is a system that learns from the patterns doctors follow when making decisions, not from written medical knowledge. Most healthcare AI today can read. It cannot observe. Tools built on large language models are trained on text. They can pull information from a patient chart or suggest a likely diagnosis, but they have no sense of how a hospital actually runs. Why does one patient get routed to a specialist while another does not? How does a discharge decision in the morning affect bed availability by afternoon? These are the kinds of questions that existing tools cannot answer, because the knowledge that drives them was never written down anywhere. Healthcare AI spending reached $1.4 billion in 2025, nearly three times what was invested the year before, yet much of that money is still funding text-based tools that replicate what is in books rather than what happens in practice. The seed round was co-led by Uncork Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures. Moxxie Ventures led the earlier pre-seed round, with Coalition Operators also participating. What Knit Health's AI Is Actually Trying to Solve The problem Knit is working on is specific. It is not about making AI smarter in a general sense. It is about capturing the kind of practical knowledge that experienced clinicians build over years of seeing patients, knowledge that exists only in behavior, not in any document or database. The AI-powered clinical decision support market is projected to grow from $857.5 million in 2025 to over $2.3 billion by 2032. Health systems are fueling that growth as they look for tools that reduce mistakes, speed up workflows, and help doctors make better calls faster. Most products chasing that opportunity, though, are still built on the same foundation: static data sets and probabilistic text outputs. Knit is taking a different technical approach. "The hardest challenge in healthcare isn't knowing what good care looks like, it's delivering it consistently for every patient. 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." Navid Farzad, Managing Partner at Frist Cressey Ventures How Knit Health Plans to Use the Funding The new capital will go toward further developing the LCBM and expanding partnerships with health systems. Knit is currently deploying its first models in three areas: triage, patient flow, and quality improvement. These happen to be some of the most complex operational problems any hospital faces, and the ones where getting decisions wrong carries real costs. Longer term, the company wants its system to sit underneath every routing decision, discharge prediction, care team assignment, and referral that a health system processes. That is a large ambition for a company in its first year. The architecture, the company says, is being built with that kind of scale as the target. The Team and Technology Behind Knit Health Knit Health was founded in 2025 by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley. The founding team brings together expertise in behavioral economics, causal inference, generative AI, and healthcare operations. Jonathan Kolstad serves as CEO. Maya Petersen, MD, PhD, is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist. Jonas Knecht and Anshul Amar serve as Co-CTO, with Knecht also holding a Co-Founder title. Ted Robertson is Co-Founder and COO. Sophie Pinkard leads product and Midori Uehara leads growth. The LCBM is trained on electronic health record data from over 130 million patients across 30 U.S. health systems, sourced through Truveta. Rather than learning from text, the model uses deep reinforcement learning, causal inference, and behavioral cloning to study sequences of clinical decisions. It then fine-tunes to each health system's own patterns, which means it adjusts to how that specific institution operates rather than applying a one-size-fits-all layer on top of existing workflows. "Much of what matters most in medicine isn't written in textbooks, it's learned through experience with time and navigating the healthcare system. 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." Jonathan Kolstad, Co-Founder and CEO of Knit Health The system is built to comply with HIPAA standards and includes governance protocols, bias testing, and continuous monitoring. The Investors Behind the Round Uncork Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures co-led the seed round. Moxxie Ventures led the pre-seed, with Coalition Operators participating in that earlier raise. Knit Health has not disclosed any other institutional funding outside these two rounds. "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. This approach redefines how intelligence is captured and scaled, opening entirely new possibilities for AI-driven innovation in healthcare." Tripp Jones, General Partner at Uncork Capital Funding details. * Company name: Knit Health * Funding round: seed * Date: May 2026 * Funding amount: $11.6 million * Lead investors: Uncork Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures Get the industry's biggest AI news straight to your inbox.

Truveta and Knit Health announce collaboration to power a new generation of clinical AI. by Ellie Lampton | May 12, 2026 Combining one of the nation's most comprehensive real-world clinical datasets with next-generation behavioral AI models to transform care delivery and patient outcomes BELLEVUE, Wash. and SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - May 12, 2026 - Truveta and Knit Health today announced a collaboration to accelerate a new generation of healthcare AI. Their work combines Truveta's large-scale, regulatory-grade real-world data with Knit's advanced clinical behavior models to transform how care is delivered, optimized, and experienced. Together, the organizations aim to unlock a fundamentally new approach to healthcare AI, one that learns from how care is actually delivered across millions of real-world patient journeys. "Patients should benefit from the data collected in their care," said Terry Myerson, CEO and co-founder of Truveta. "This collaboration helps turn real-world experiences into better decisions so patients can get the right care at the right time, with fewer delays and better outcomes." Knit Health is building a world model that learns from real clinical decision-making. These models of care act as dynamic pathways rather than static guidelines, predicting where a patient should go next, which actions are most likely to succeed given real-world constraints, and how alternative paths through the system shape outcomes. At the core of Knit's platform is its Large Clinical Behavior Model (LCBM), trained on Truveta Data. Truveta Data includes de-identified, daily refreshed EHR data for more than 130 million patients - including clinical notes and imaging - linked with closed claims, mortality, and social drivers of health to enable longitudinal research across the full patient journey. With documented provenance, rigorous quality controls, and audit-ready lineage, Truveta Data provides a trusted foundation for generating timely, reliable real-world evidence. "Our goal is to support better decisions, actions, and navigation in complex, real-world clinical environments," said Jonathan Kolstad, co-founder and CEO of Knit Health. "We're working to build a world model of care and by integrating with Truveta Data, our model gets smarter every time a physician makes a decision." The collaboration will focus on high-impact areas where better coordination and decision-making can directly improve patient care, including: * Specialist routing and referral optimization to help patients reach the right provider sooner * Predictive patient flow and capacity management to reduce delays and improve access to care * Care pathway optimization to support faster, more consistent clinical decisions Knit's models operate as an infrastructure layer, sitting beneath every routing decision, every discharge prediction, every care team allocation, every referral, and eventually every clinical workflow that touches a patient. It works directly within clinical and operational workflows in real time while aligning with how clinicians already practice medicine. By grounding these capabilities in Truveta's continuously updated data, the collaboration creates a continuous learning cycle: real-world data informs models, and those models help improve care delivery, leading to better outcomes and new insights over time. The result is care that is more responsive, coordinated, and timely for patients. This collaboration represents a step toward a healthcare system that continuously learns and improves, where better care is scaled across health systems so every patient can benefit. About Truveta Truveta is a real-world intelligence company transforming medical science with unprecedented data and AI. Truveta powers breakthrough discoveries, accelerates regulatory-grade evidence, and unlocks real-time insights from a dataset uniquely built with and owned by U.S. health systems - united by a mission of Saving Lives with Data. 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.