Voice-first AI agents for the phone calls that keep patients waiting - benefits verification, prior authorization, and intake.
100ms co-founders Kshitij Gupta, Aniket Behera, and Sarvesh Dwivedi, photographed in the pivot from live-video infrastructure to healthcare - the same real-time systems that once carried live cricket to millions now sit on hold with insurers.
Healthcare, for all its clinical sophistication, still runs on the telephone. A pharmacist calls a payer to confirm coverage. A coordinator waits on hold to file a prior authorization. A referral is faxed, then chased. 100ms - a San Francisco company founded in 2020 - is building voice-first AI agents to make those calls instead, starting in specialty pharmacy where the delays are longest and the stakes are highest.
The agents automate what the industry calls patient access: benefits verification, prior authorization, referral intake, appointment scheduling, and patient intake. They talk to insurers, navigate phone trees, capture the answers, and escalate to a human when a conversation needs one. The goal is narrow and concrete - shorten the gap between a prescription being written and a patient starting treatment.
What makes the company unusual is where it came from. 100ms did not begin in healthcare. It began as a low-code platform for adding live video and audio to apps, born out of the challenge of letting millions of people in India watch live cricket together. That heritage - real-time audio, latency measured in milliseconds - is now pointed at a different problem.
Specialty pharmacy handles the complex, high-cost medications that treat conditions like cancer and autoimmune disease. Before a patient can start, coverage must be verified and, often, a prior authorization approved. That administrative gauntlet is where treatment stalls.
By the company's account, 40% of patients abandon therapy when a prior authorization is required, and those who stay wait an average of 29 days to get their medication. Behind each figure is a chain of phone calls that no one enjoys making and that machines, done carefully, can handle.
100ms frames this as a voice problem rather than a paperwork problem - the bottleneck is the call itself, and the call is exactly what its founders spent a decade learning to build.
The company's name is its old engineering goal: 100 milliseconds, the threshold at which a conversation feels instant.
100ms is building AI agents that automate complex patient access workflows in U.S. healthcare - starting with benefits verification, prior authorisation, and referral intake in specialty pharmacy.
Voice-first AI agents that automate benefits verification, prior authorization, and referral intake in specialty pharmacy.
Since 2024Calls payers to confirm insurance coverage, replacing the manual phone work that delays the start of care.
2024Automates the PA workflow to cut the delays that push patients to abandon therapy.
2024Appointment scheduling, patient intake, and automated reminders with real-time conversation flow and human escalation.
2025Clinical safety protocols, HIPAA compliance, US-based data residency, and escalation to human agents built in.
OngoingThe original low-code product for adding live video/audio to apps - virtual events, classrooms, audio rooms, telehealth.
2020The healthcare voice-AI field is crowded - Infinitus, VoiceCare AI, and Hippocratic AI all pursue versions of the same promise, alongside horizontal voice-agent platforms like Retell AI. 100ms's distinction is less about the model and more about the plumbing beneath it.
Its founders built real-time voice and video at scale before large language models made voice agents fashionable: video for the first iPhone and 3G networks, the infrastructure for Facebook Live, and the world's largest live streaming platform at Disney+ Hotstar. That infrastructure once supported millions of minutes of telehealth and voice interactions. The bet is that low-latency, reliable voice - the hard, unglamorous part - is a durable advantage when a conversation has to sound natural and stay compliant.
The company also picked a deliberately narrow beachhead. Rather than chasing the flashiest use case, it started with specialty pharmacy's benefits verification and prior auth - boring, expensive, and universally disliked. In a regulated market, it argues, trust is the product: guardrails, HIPAA compliance, and human escalation are not features bolted on later but the reason a health system will pick up the phone.
A decade of low-latency voice/video from Facebook and Disney+ Hotstar, repurposed for healthcare calls.
Focused on specialty pharmacy patient access, not a general-purpose assistant.
Clinical guardrails, HIPAA, US data residency, and human escalation as core design.
100ms is a B2B SaaS company. It sells voice AI agents and automation to healthcare providers, specialty pharmacies, and patient-services teams, typically on subscription or usage-based contracts. Its earlier live-video business ran on a similar subscription and usage model, selling to developers embedding real-time video in their apps.
The company describes itself as a team of engineers, clinicians, and operators - a mix meant to keep the AI grounded in how healthcare actually works.
Built video for the first iPhone and Facebook Live; VP Engineering at Disney+ Hotstar before founding 100ms.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $4.5M | 2021 | Accel, Strive.vc |
| Series A | $20M | Mar 2022 | Alpha Wave Incubation (lead), Matrix Partners India, LocalGlobe, Accel, Strive.vc |
| Total | $24.5M | - | Across two rounds |
The Series A was raised for the live-video business; the company has since redirected its focus to healthcare voice AI.
Kshitij Gupta, Aniket Behera, and Sarvesh Dwivedi launch 100ms as a low-code live video/audio platform, rooted in their work at Disney+ Hotstar.
Raises a $4.5M seed to build out the live-video developer platform.
Alpha Wave Incubation leads a $20M round with Matrix Partners India, LocalGlobe, Accel, and Strive.vc - total funding reaches $24.5M.
The company repositions from live-video infrastructure to voice AI for healthcare operations under the 100ms.ai brand.
Voice agents grow beyond benefits verification into prior authorization, referral intake, scheduling, and intake.
Joins the February 2026 cohort to validate and scale its voice AI against real clinical workflows.
100ms builds voice-first AI agents that automate patient access in U.S. healthcare - benefits verification, prior authorization, referral intake, scheduling, and intake - starting in specialty pharmacy.
It started as one. Founded in 2020, 100ms was a low-code live video and audio infrastructure platform (100ms.live). It has since pivoted to healthcare voice AI at 100ms.ai, reusing its real-time communications expertise.
Kshitij Gupta (Co-Founder & CEO), Aniket Behera, and Sarvesh Dwivedi. The founders previously built video systems at Facebook and Disney+ Hotstar.
About $24.5M total - a $4.5M seed and a $20M Series A (March 2022) led by Alpha Wave Incubation, with Matrix Partners India, LocalGlobe, Accel, and Strive.vc.
The company builds its agents to be HIPAA-compliant with US-based data residency, clinical safety guardrails, and human escalation, and joined the Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate cohort in 2026 to validate them.