Company leader
Israel Krush
Co-founder and CEO
Hyro
Israel Krush is co-founder and chief executive of Hyro, a New York company that makes AI agents for health system call centers, websites, and text messages. An Israeli engineer and product leader who came to New York for business school, he built Hyro so a health system's patients can book appointments, find a doctor, or get routine answers without waiting on hold.
Unit 8200, Intel, and Zeekit
He started his career in the Israeli army's Unit 8200, the intelligence unit many Israeli entrepreneurs come from, where much of the work is filtering large amounts of data, including language, for operational use. His background is in computer science and statistics. He worked as a software engineer at Intel and then at startups in cybersecurity and advertising technology, and before Hyro he was head of product at Zeekit, a computer vision company that Walmart acquired. The common thread across those jobs was how people interact with computers, through language or through vision.
Founding Hyro at Cornell Tech
In 2017 he moved to the United States for an MBA at Cornell Tech, Cornell University's technology campus in New York City, where he met Rom Cohen, a computer science student. They bought early voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home and came away disappointed. That led them to two conclusions: natural language would become the main way people use technology, and such systems were too hard for large organizations to build and maintain. They founded Hyro in 2018 with Uri Valevski.
Hyro reads an organization's existing data, such as its physician directory and website, into a knowledge graph, so its agents can answer questions nobody scripted in advance and staff can see where each answer came from. He has made that visibility central to Hyro's work with hospitals, because software that makes up an answer for a patient is a safety problem. "Letting an AI decide what to say or write to patients is problematic, and they will have hallucinations," he told Black Opal Ventures.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic Hyro gave health networks a chatbot that answered questions about the virus and ran self-assessments, and that work convinced the founders healthcare was their market. In October 2025 Hyro raised $45 million led by Healthier Capital, a round that doubled its valuation and brought total funding to $95 million.
Personal
He and his wife have four children. Outside his family, his great passion is excellent coffee.