Caroline Merin, who spent nearly a decade developing on-demand services as the first Latin American general manager for Uber Eats and later the COO of Rappi, realizes how far behind technology in health care is. While patients expect doctors to respond as quickly as their delivery apps, most medical professionals on the continent are forced to rely on WhatsApp for all patient communication.

“I thought, as a patient, especially as an American, how amazing it is that I can text my doctor on WhatsApp, and they respond,” he told TechCrunch.

But Merin also realized how difficult this form of communication was for doctors. “A doctor who sees 20 patients a day, gets home, has 100 messages and is expected to respond quickly and remember who the patient is without the health record in front of them,” he said.

Merin, who has long been interested in building his own startup, saw an opportunity to improve the communication challenges of doctors. So, two years ago, he launched Leona Healthan AI-copilot integrated with doctors’ WhatsApp accounts.

On Tuesday, Leona disclosed that it has raised $14 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the participation of General Catalyst; Accel; Maven Clinic CEO Kate Ryder; Nubank CEO David Vélez; and Rappi CEO Simón Borrero. The startup also announced that its service is now available to doctors in 14 Latin American countries in 22 medical specialties.

With Leona, patients continue to send messages on WhatsApp, but doctors receive and manage the communication through the mobile app to begin with. The app sorts all messages according to priority, suggests responses, and allows other team members (such as doctors or nurses) to respond to patients on behalf of the doctor.

The startup will also soon launch a fully autonomous agent that will handle conversation scheduling and simple drinking.

Solving the WhatsApp communication challenge in Latin America is important because, according to Merin, patients in Latin America often choose their doctors based on their willingness to communicate using this channel.

“These poor doctors, they get requests for very serious medical consultations of, ‘I need a letter for my children’s school,’ or, ‘I want a receipt for my appointment last week,'” Merin said.

Since these messages can come at night and on weekends, doctors are often forced to monitor their WhatsApp around the clock. Leona solves this by immediately alerting doctors to the most serious health requests and allowing them to deprioritize more routine or administrative questions.

“The idea is to help the doctor recover time,” Merin said. “We hear from our users that they save two to three hours a day by using Leona.”

While Leona started by serving Latin America, the company’s long-term mission is to expand its services to other geographies, where, unlike the US, patients also request and are allowed to communicate with their doctors through WhatsApp, rather than through electronic medical record systems like Epic.

Leona’s team of 13 is currently split between Mexico City and Silicon Valley, where, according to Merin, the best AI engineers are located.