Equiti, a healthcare language access company based in Sunrise, Florida, has acquired Lexi AI, Inc., a young startup that sells AI interpretation for conversations between patients and care staff. Equiti announced the deal on October 28, 2026, in a press release distributed by EIN Presswire.
Neither company disclosed the price or other financial terms, and no headcount was given for Lexi.
Lexi will keep running as its own product alongside Martti, Equiti's network of human medical interpreters. Equiti said the two teams will work together on rolling out and integrating the products across hospital workflows, and that it will decide with each customer how the combined offering fits that organisation's language access policies. HIT Consultant reported that Lexi co-founder and CEO Linh Pham will join Equiti's executive team as president, and that co-founder Siddharth UR will become head of innovation.
What Lexi built
Lexi began in spring 2024 as a studio project in Harvard's Master in Design Engineering programme, according to the timeline on its website. Siddharth UR tested the idea in clinical settings during a summer fellowship at Mass General Brigham that year, and the team grew through a Harvard Business School course on healthcare innovation. In March 2025 it won the Peter M. Sacerdote Grand Prize in the Social Enterprise Track of the HBS New Venture Competition.
The product offers AI interpretation in more than 35 languages and dialects and can be connected to electronic health record systems, including Epic, and to phone lines. Lexi pitches it for the routine parts of a visit, such as check-in, scheduling, reminders and taking vital signs, in places where a hospital's own policies allow AI to be used. When a conversation becomes clinical, sensitive or complex, or when a patient asks for a person, staff can bring in a qualified human interpreter. Every session is saved as a transcript.
Its first large customer was Lowell Community Health Center in Massachusetts, which started a pilot in August 2025 and later expanded it from one department to eight. Lexi's website says the tool has supported more than 300,000 minutes of conversation. The company was also named one of TechCrunch's top health and wellness startups from Startup Battlefield in December 2025.
“AI is opening a new chapter in language access, and Equiti is committed to leading it responsibly.”
The founders and the funding
Linh Pham, who was born in Vietnam, studied at Brown and Harvard and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the self-driving company Motional before starting Lexi. Siddharth UR trained at Harvard as a designer and researcher and previously worked in product and research roles at Philips Healthcare and Mass General Brigham.
In February 2026 Lexi announced a $1.4 million pre-seed round led by Informed Ventures. Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of New York, Alumni Ventures, Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United and Van Wickle Ventures also took part. The company said it had also received non-dilutive funding, including the HBS competition prize, the Harvard Innovation Labs Social Impact Fellowship Fund and a place in the MassChallenge and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Health Equity Business Accelerator. No later round was reported before the sale.
Why Equiti is buying
Equiti traces its roots to Martti, which its founder Andy Panos built as one of the first services to offer remote video interpretation in hospitals more than twenty years ago. Through Martti, Equiti gives hospitals round-the-clock access to qualified interpreters in more than 250 languages and dialects, including American Sign Language. Its interpreters go through a 120-hour healthcare curriculum. HIT Consultant said the company handles more than 1.5 million care sessions a month across more than 4,000 facilities, and that it is backed by the private equity firms GTCR and Heritage Group, which brought Cloudbreak Health and Voyce together under the Equiti name.
Equiti is packaging the deal under a model it calls Modality Matters. In that setup, a hospital assigns routine, lower-risk exchanges to AI and sends complex clinical conversations, or those governed by regulation or patient preference, to a human interpreter. Staff can move a session from one to the other as it unfolds. The company argued that better communication with patients affects clinical outcomes, staff workload and finances, not only patient experience.
"AI is opening a new chapter in language access, and Equiti is committed to leading it responsibly," said Maureen Huber, Equiti's chief executive, who called the purchase an investment in the next generation of language access.
AI meets human interpreters
The deal comes as hospitals test AI for more administrative and clinical work and as interpretation providers try to work out where machine translation fits alongside trained staff. Equiti's approach keeps human interpreters at the centre of clinical conversations and positions AI for the many short exchanges that often happen without any language support at all.
In 2026 Equiti was named a Leader in the Slator Language Service Provider Index and ranked fifth for healthcare interpreting in the Nimdzi 100, according to the announcement. Panos, now founder in residence at Equiti, said the technology had changed since Martti's early video service but the aim of removing language as a barrier to care had not.
