Healthcare Without Health Workers: A Unicorn Pivots to an AI Doctor-in-a-Box

If Adrian Aoun has his way, the next time you visit the doctor’s office, you won’t see a single medical professional. In fact, he said, “I don’t even believe a doctor’s office should exist.”

Instead, the outspoken founder and CEO of primary care startup Forward wants you to entrust your health to a landmark new product, the CarePod—a whirring, purring autonomous module that looks like an airport lactation room crossed with a space capsule. Aoun hopes the compartments will soon be found inside malls and office buildings around the U.S. “What we really need is healthcare to be a product, not a service,” he said. “I just want to take every single thing that doctors and nurses are doing and migrate it over to hardware and software.”

Today’s unveiling of the CarePod comes alongside a $100 million Series E round that will help Forward build and deploy the devices. The new funding includes equity financing of more than $50 million as well as debt financing; Aoun declined to disclose the valuation. Preexisting backers Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins chair John Doerr, Tencent and Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, and new investors Samsung Next and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority participated in the round.

Forward has raised over $400 million since its 2017 founding, according to a source familiar with the company’s finances, and was last valued at $1 billion in 2021. Aoun, who declined to reveal its revenue, said it’s not profitable. “Of course not. This is Silicon Valley,” he scoffed. “Profitable? What are these words of which you speak? No, we’re not profitable.”