Company leader
Rom Cohen
Co-founder and COO
Hyro
Rom Cohen is co-founder and chief operating officer of Hyro, a New York company that makes AI agents for health system call centers, websites, and text messages. An engineer who trained at Cornell Tech, he ran Hyro's technology as chief information officer before taking over operations, and its agents take routine patient requests such as scheduling and physician search off call-center staff.
Turbonomic and Cornell Tech
Before Hyro he helped develop the Autonomic Control Platform at Turbonomic, software that automatically shifts computing resources in data centers so applications keep performing. He then earned a Master of Engineering in computer science at Cornell Tech, Cornell University's technology campus in New York City, finishing in 2018. There he met Israel Krush, then an MBA student.
Founding Hyro
He and Krush were early buyers of voice assistants and found them rigid. "After joining the masses in getting excited about innovative voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home, we ultimately felt underwhelmed by the simplistic use cases and lack of dynamic experiences," he told AlleyWatch in 2023. That led them to two beliefs: natural language would become the main way people use computers, and conversational assistants were too hard for large organizations to deploy and maintain.
They founded Hyro in 2018, and Uri Valevski, a natural language understanding expert, joined as the third co-founder. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator made an initial $100,000 investment, and the team built its first proof of concept and pilot in Cornell Tech's co-working space.
Hyro then chose healthcare, where patients often struggle to find information or finish simple tasks such as booking a visit. Its software reads a health system's websites, databases, and records into a knowledge graph, so its agents answer from that data and flag topics patients ask about that the data does not cover. Its most common jobs are scheduling, appointment changes, prescription refills, physician search, and routine questions, which together make up most calls to a health system.
Personal
Away from work he likes walking through Central Park with his wife and their young daughter.