According to TechCrunch, Leona Health, a startup building an AI copilot for doctors who communicate with patients via WhatsApp, has raised $14 million in a seed funding round. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and included General Catalyst, Accel, and CEOs from Maven Clinic, Nubank, and Rappi. The company was founded two years ago by Caroline Merin, the former Latin American GM for Uber Eats and COO of Rappi. Leona’s service is now live for doctors in 14 Latin American countries across 22 specialties, and the 13-person team is split between Mexico City and Silicon Valley. The startup also announced plans to launch a fully autonomous agent for scheduling and patient intake soon.
Solving the Right Problem
Here’s the thing: this isn’t about building another fancy patient portal that no one uses. Leona is tackling the messy, chaotic reality of how medicine actually works in a huge part of the world. In Latin America, WhatsApp is the healthcare system’s communication layer. Patients choose doctors based on their WhatsApp responsiveness. So doctors are trapped, fielding everything from urgent chest pain descriptions to requests for school notes at 10 PM.
Leona’s smart move is meeting everyone where they already are. Patients keep using WhatsApp. But on the doctor‘s end, the chaos gets filtered, sorted by priority, and managed with AI-suggested replies. It’s a classic “glue” solution—it doesn’t try to change user behavior, just makes the existing, broken behavior manageable. Saving doctors 2-3 hours a day? That’s not a minor efficiency gain. That’s the difference between burnout and sustainability.
The Silicon Valley Connection
The funding and team structure tell their own story. A $14M seed round is enormous, and landing a16z as a lead signals this isn’t seen as just a “LatAm fix.” This is a bet on a global model. And Merin’s comment about having engineers in Silicon Valley “where the best AI engineers are located” is a telling bit of strategy. They’re building the AI brain with top-tier talent, while the operational and market expertise sits in the region they’re serving first. It’s a powerful combo.
But it makes you wonder: is this a long-term play for the US, too? Probably. The article mentions expansion to other geographies where WhatsApp, not formal EMR systems, is the patient expectation. Think parts of Europe, Asia, Africa. The US, with its HIPAA and entrenched systems, is a tougher nut to crack, but the core problem—doctor inbox overload—is universal. Leona might just be starting with the most acute pain point.
The Autonomous Agent Future
The planned launch of a fully autonomous agent for scheduling and intake is where this gets really interesting. Right now, Leona is a copilot—a smart assistant. An autonomous agent starts taking over entire workflows. “I need to reschedule my appointment” becomes a conversation handled start-to-finish by the AI, only escalating to a human if something goes off-script.
This is the trajectory. You start by organizing the chaos. Then you automate the simple, repetitive tasks within that chaos. Basically, you give doctors their time and mental bandwidth back, piece by piece. If Leona can prove this model works at scale in the complex, high-trust domain of healthcare, the implications are huge. It’s not just about answering messages faster. It’s about rebuilding the crumbling administrative backbone of clinical practice, one chat bubble at a time.
