Stanford Professor's Health AI Startup Seeks $100M at $1B Valuation

Gate News message, April 25 — Stanford professor James Zou is raising approximately $100 million for Human Intelligence, a California startup developing AI models for human physiology, at a valuation of roughly $1 billion.

The company builds on Zou's research in physiology and AI. His lab's EchoNet algorithm has FDA clearance, and this year the lab published a Nature paper on SleepFM, a foundation model trained on nearly 600,000 hours of sleep data from 65,000 people that can predict disease risk for over 100 conditions. Human Intelligence plans to collaborate with Kernel, Bryan Johnson's neurotech company that manufactures headsets to record neural activity.

The funding round reflects a broader trend among Stanford spinouts securing large investments. Engramme is discussing a $100 million round, while Periodic Labs is seeking hundreds of millions at approximately a $7 billion valuation. The health AI sector is increasingly focused on specialized foundation models built on proprietary data, such as sleep recordings and neural signals, as generic AI models can make significant errors on specialized scientific tasks.