And to be clear, Moxi is not replacing human nurses or taking away their jobs, but helping alleviate the nursing shortage but letting human nurses do more.
In October 2019, Austin-based Diligent Robotics launched Moxi – an autonomous robot designed to assist doctors and nurses in a hospital setting. First unveiled in 2018, the collaborative robot assistant or “cobot” was designed to perform tasks like fetching medications, delivering lab samples, supplies, etc – tasks that do not require any direct patient interaction.
A report by the Institute of Medicine flags a worrying trend – nurses these days have less time to spend with their patients due to the increasing burden on non-nursing activities. According to the Journal of Nursing Management, nurses were spending up to 33% of their shift time on tasks like fetching medicines and delivering lab samples. And these are precisely the tasks Moxi was designed to handle autonomously.
Given the background of the founders, this is not very surprising. These ladies have impressive credentials in the field of social robotics. Andrea Thomaz is a social robotics expert while Vivian Chu specializes in human-robot interactions. They have featured on prestigious shortlists like MIT’s 35 Under 35 and Inc Magazine’s 100 Female Founders.
Launched in 2017, Diligent Robotics is led by Dr. Vivian Chu and Dr. Andrea Thomaz, experts in the field of social robotics. In a quote to RobotReport, CEO Thomaz had this to say about Moxi:
“Our vision is to improve the way people think about their work by giving them more time to utilize their unique human skills and let friendly robot assistants efficiently take care of their chores.”
Andrea Thomaz had this to say about the reaction of nurses and hospital staff during early beta trials in Texas:
“Another hugely pleasant surprise during our beta trials was the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Moxi by patients and their families, along with the front-line staff working with Moxi.”
The startup attracted the attention of VCs like True Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures who led the early funding rounds, raising $3 million in seed money. That was a few months before the outbreak of the COVID pandemic.
Since then, investor interest in the company has soared, driven by an urgent need for technology-based solutions to fill the glaring gaps in the understaffed and overworked healthcare sector in the US. In their Series A funding round in 2020, the startup raised $10 million from early investors and new arrivals like DNX Ventures.
This was followed by an additional injection of $30 million through Series B rounds in 2022. The funding was led by Tiger Global.
To date, Diligent has raised $50 million in funding from 18 investors, including the E14 Fund, Next Coast Ventures, Boom Capital, Gaingels, and Cedars Sinai Health Ventures. The sustained investor interest is driven by the company’s unique position in a nascent market with massive potential.
The significance of a product like Moxi for the future of healthcare cannot be overstated at a time when the shortage of nurses is reaching critical levels. Even before the pandemic, hospitals were struggling to fill clinical positions. The national shortage of nurses was expected to surpass 9 million by 2030.
COVID has only exacerbated the crisis, leading to burnout among frontline healthcare personnel. According to McKinsey, a full 22% of the nursing staff were contemplating a future outside the profession in 2021. The strain on hospital staff is already a cause for concern.
Under the duo’s leadership, Diligent Robotics has already crossed several milestones in recent years. Commercial deployment of Moxi has accelerated since its inception in the market in 2020. The robot is now a part of numerous hospitals around the US, and demand is still growing as Chief Nursing Officers look for ways to overcome crippling staff shortages.
This sentiment was echoed by David Marshall, Chief of Nursing at Cedars Sinai, one of the backers of Diligent:
“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.”