Babylon announces new collaboration with Microsoft to drive healthcare innovation and improve health access and affordability around the world

The organizations will collaborate to explore opportunities to use their respective Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Cloud Technologies in combination to accelerate the delivery of improved personalized care, and reduce the overall cost of care through integrated digital pathways

REDMOND, Wash. & PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Babylon, a world leading digital-first, value-based care company today announced a collaboration to explore opportunities to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare for people across the world by using their combined AI, Machine Learning and Cloud technologies. 

The new collaboration has the aim of exploring opportunities to accelerate and enhance current AI and Machine Learning, utilizing them to shift the focus from sick care to preventative health care.

"Babylon and Microsoft working together shows our combined commitment to build on our leading-edge digital health technologies and deliver better access and greater affordability for health systems and patients alike", said Ali Parsa, Chief Executive Officer, Babylon. "We share the same vision of healthcare and believe that by bringing our assets together we can further the digital health revolution, offer immediate access to all-in-one personalized care and we can enhance the consumer experience, improve patient outcomes and reduce overall costs."

As part of this relationship, the two organizations will explore opportunities to innovate and deliver across product, cloud and AI research with the view toward increasing the impact of their complementary healthcare technologies and extending the Babylon healthcare platform.

The initial step in this collaboration will see Babylon's digital health software solutions and Babylon's Cloud Services, made available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This will enable payers and providers to access Babylon's AI-powered Symptom Checker and Healthcheck via the Marketplace. The Commercial Marketplace currently reaches more than four million monthly active users across 140 geographies—with 100,000 high-potential leads generated monthly.

"As we take these first steps on our journey together, I am excited that Babylon Cloud Services will be made available first through the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, bringing the benefit of our cloud native technology to the Microsoft healthcare community", said Paul-Henri Ferrand, Chief Business Officer, Babylon. "Our transformational AI powered tools have already been used by millions of people around the world, confidently giving them access to the highest quality health information, helping them to identify symptoms, empowering them to care for themselves when possible, and guide them through the health system if professional help is required."

"This collaboration will allow us to build on our existing capabilities so we can proactively support patients through the devices they already own, and shift the focus from reactive to proactive healthcare," said Tom McGuinness, CVP of Global Healthcare & Life Sciences, Microsoft. "We look forward to bringing our collective expertise and technologies to drive innovation in healthcare and capitalize on the current digital health revolution by improving the personalization, automation and digitization of the healthcare journey for both clinicians and patients."

The services went live  available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace on October 12 2021.

Going forward, Babylon will utilize a number of Microsoft products and services to support its technology stack across its Compute, Storage and Data Services including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Blob Storage.

Babylon currently serves over 24 million people across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and 11 countries in Asia with services offered in over 15 languages. In 2020, the company helped one patient every five seconds with approximately 6 million patient interactions. Moreover, Babylon has a 95 percent user retention rate and a 5-star rating from more than 90 percent of its users.

About Babylon

Babylon is a world leading, digital-first, value-based care company whose mission is to make high-quality healthcare accessible and affordable for everyone on Earth.

Babylon is re-engineering healthcare, shifting the focus from sick care to preventative healthcare so that patients experience better health, and reduced costs. This is achieved by leveraging a highly scalable, digital-first platform combined with high quality, virtual clinical operations to provide all-in-one, personalized healthcare. We endeavor to keep patients at the peak of health and get them back on their feet as quickly as possible, all from their devices, with the aim to promote longer and healthier lives. When sick, Babylon provides assistance to navigate the health system, connecting patients digitally to the right clinician 24/7, at no additional cost.

Founded in 2013, we have since delivered millions of clinical consultations and AI interactions, with c.2m clinical consultations and c.3.9m AI interactions in 2020 alone. We work with governments, health providers and insurers across the globe, and support healthcare facilities from small local practices to large hospitals. For more information, please visit www.babylonhealth.com/us.

About Alkuri Global Acquisition Corp.

Alkuri Global Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: KURI, KURIU and KURIW) is a blank check company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses or entities. While Alkuri Global Acquisition Corp. may pursue a business combination in any industry, the company intends to favor next-generation technology businesses led by visionary founders and teams leveraging data and artificial intelligence in the areas of Consumer Internet and Marketplaces, Healthtech, Fintech and Mobility.