Company leader
Alex Cohen
Co-founder and CEO
Hello Patient
Alex Cohen is co-founder and chief executive of Hello Patient, a company that runs AI phone, text, and chat agents for outpatient practices. He is a repeat founder from consumer technology who moved into healthcare at Carbon Health, and he built Hello Patient as a managed service that takes patient calls and texts off a practice's front desk.
Birch Finance and Even
He co-founded Birch Finance, a credit card rewards app that read a user's transactions and showed which card in the wallet would earn the most points. Birch competed in TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield, and in October 2018 Even Financial bought it. Even builds software that matches consumers with loan and credit card offers, and he joined it as senior director of its credit card marketplace.
Patient calls at Carbon Health
He then spent more than three years at Carbon Health, a primary care chain, leading its consumer and growth product teams, where his job was attracting and keeping patients. He rebuilt its call-center systems and managed patient communications, and he saw how much of that work still ran through the phone. "No matter how many self-serve tools I would build for consumers to get access to their charts or make appointments, they just picked up the phone and they called the practice," he told Fierce Healthcare in 2024.
Starting Hello Patient
He left Carbon in January 2024 with several colleagues and started Hello Patient that April with Nick DeRobertis, its chief technology officer. Its agent, Mia, answers calls, texts, and chats and reads and writes to each practice's scheduling and records systems. He built the company on the view that clinic phone work is too specific for general-purpose voice products, so his team learns each customer's appointment types and triage rules before going live, sometimes on site. Hello Patient sells the result as a managed service priced like software.
Hello Patient raised a $6.3 million seed round from 8VC, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures, then a $22.5 million Series A in September 2025 led by Scale Venture Partners, at a $100 million valuation. By then its agents handled 10,000 to 20,000 conversations a day, up from hundreds a day the previous October. It focuses on urgent care, ENT and allergy, and primary care practices.