Comparing Balto and Hyro? Both are Contact Center & CCaaS and Voice & Phone AI tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
| Attribute | Balto | Hyro |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · Custom | Paid · Custom |
| Founded | 2017 | 2018 |
| Categories | Agent Assist & Copilots Contact Center & CCaaS Voice & Phone AI | AI Agents & Chatbots Contact Center & CCaaS Voice & Phone AI |
| Integrations | Five9 Genesys Cloud NICE CXone RingCentral 8x8 Salesforce | Epic MyChart Salesforce Health Cloud Genesys Cloud Five9 |
Balto puts the right words on the agent's screen while the call is still happening. Founded in 2017 in St. Louis by Marc Bernstein and Chris Kontes, it pioneered real-time guidance for contact centers: dynamic checklists, objection responses, and compliance language that appear mid-conversation, exactly when needed, rather than in a coaching session three weeks later. In industries like collections, insurance, healthcare, and home services, where certain sentences are legally required and certain mistakes are expensive, that immediacy is the whole product.
The platform has grown around that core into real-time QA that scores every call as it happens, AI coaching that spots which behaviors need work, live compliance monitoring with manager alerts, and Togo, Balto's voice AI agents for the repetitive calls, like scheduling and account verification, that never needed a human. It integrates with the major contact-center platforms, including Five9, Genesys Cloud, NICE CXone, RingCentral, and 8x8.
Balto raised a $37.5 million Series B led by Stripes in 2021, with RingCentral's venture arm participating, bringing total funding to roughly $52 million, and remains one of the flagship companies of the St. Louis tech scene, with customers like Humana, GEHA, Nelnet, NewRez, and Staples Canada. Pricing is quote-based; there is no public price list.
Choose Balto when what is said on live calls carries real regulatory or revenue weight. Pure digital-support teams will find better fits elsewhere in this directory, but if your operation runs on phone conversations where compliance phrasing and in-the-moment guidance decide outcomes, Balto's real-time focus is still the sharpest in the category.
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Hyro builds AI agents for healthcare, aimed at the call centers and websites of hospitals and health systems. Its voice and chat agents run over phone, web, SMS, and mobile apps and handle patient facing drudgery: scheduling and rescheduling appointments, prescription refills, MyChart troubleshooting, billing questions, and call routing, with escalation to humans when needed. Deep EHR integration, especially with Epic, is the differentiator, letting agents complete tasks end to end instead of reading FAQs aloud. In June 2026 it launched Care Intelligence, an analytics layer that turns millions of agent conversations into patient access insights for operations teams.
Israel Krush and Rom Cohen founded Hyro in 2018 during their final semester at Cornell Tech, and Weill Cornell Medicine became both first customer and investor. The company now serves around 45 large healthcare organizations, including Intermountain Health, Baptist Health, Hackensack Meridian Health, and Bon Secours Mercy Health. It has raised $95 million in total, most recently a $45 million growth round in October 2025 led by Healthier Capital, the fund of former One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin, with Norwest and Define Ventures participating. A May 2026 Five9 partnership cut contact center integration to about an hour.
Hyro does not publish pricing. Contracts are custom, scoped to call volume, channels, and integration depth, and its own 2026 benchmark report frames value in ROI terms, claiming deep EHR integrations unlock over $1 million in returns. Expect an enterprise sales process with security and HIPAA review, not a signup page.
Choose Hyro if you are a health system, especially an Epic shop, drowning in patient access calls, and you want a vendor that lives entirely in healthcare, speaks HIPAA natively, and plugs into your existing contact center stack. If you are outside healthcare it is simply not for you, and small clinics without real call center volume will struggle to justify the enterprise motion.
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