AI partnership is latest Nvidia foray into healthcare space

A medical imaging company is deploying AI to assist in its operations—and turning to an industry powerhouse for help.

Chicago-based Hoppr is integrating Nvidia systems into its AI development framework, the Hoppr AI Foundry. It’s a partnership that the company hopes will accelerate its existing platform. The company already used Nvidia GPUs, Hoppr founder and CEO Khan Siddiqui told IT Brew, and reached out to the AI chip-making giant to deploy its models as a natural next step to add reasoning capabilities to the existing image generation and text conversion that Hoppr already provides users.

“Now our customers can cherry-pick what functionality they need,” Siddiqui said. “They can combine multiple models for similar tasks, they can take the finding model and then run it against the reasoning model.”

Backgrounder. Hoppr was founded in 2019 and raised $31.5 million in Series A funding last June. The company acts as a platform for AI development in medical imaging, and because of the regulations surrounding medical devices, software that manages those images needs to adhere to FDA and EU MDR guidelines that require “certain software development standards to be followed, as well as how data is handled, data provenance, things like that,” Siddiqui said.

“The typical, average time to build an AI model for medical imaging used to be about 18 months to two years—just getting data, setting up the infrastructure for it, and all of the stuff that needs to happen,” Siddiqui added. “The reason people try to do it locally, on prem, is because they want to optimize how images are handled.”

Details, details. Two Nvidia open models will be used in Hoppr products, NV-Reason and NV-Generate. They will accentuate existing imaging from Hoppr by assisting imaging interpretations and streamlining workflows, respectively. The models are used by a “a range of companies across Med Tech, Digital Health, and Digital Biology,” David Niewolny, Nvidia senior director and global head of business development for healthcare and medical wrote in an email to IT Brew, with over 10,000 downloads since their announcement in October 2025. AI models in imaging aren’t confined to Hoppr, either; companies like Aidoc are pursuing similar uses of the technology.

In an interview, Niewolny said he sees his company’s products—GPUs and AI systems alike—as the foundational layer for leveraging software infrastructure at places like Hoppr. Nvidia’s healthcare business has utilized AI in the space and collaborations with companies like Hoppr are the next step.

“A term I use is moving it from the bench to the bedside—no longer is this just scientific research that’s going to be published, this is something that’s actually going to now have the ability to be scaled,” Niewolny said. “And obviously from a Nvidia business perspective, that scaling and that use of AI, not only does it improve access to care, improve care, improve workflow efficiency, it also drives consumption of more GPUs throughout the ecosystem.”

Looking ahead. The partnership is the latest sign of the growth of AI in the medical space, Niewolny told IT Brew. Rather than being applied piecemeal, the models can be scaled up; it’s something that he believes will guide the future of healthcare IT.

“Just look at the direction where AI is going,” Niewolny said. “It’s truly becoming an always-on capability that’s going to be core to hospital infrastructure.”