The voice AI that doesn't route your call. It picks up, understands the medicine, and gets the thing done.
EXHIBIT A: The front desk that never sleeps, never sighs, and never puts you on hold to "check with the scheduler."
It is after hours. The lights in the clinic are off. The schedulers went home four hours ago. And yet the phone is answered on the first ring, by a voice that knows the difference between a mole check and a Mohs follow-up, that already has the patient's chart open, and that books the appointment before the call hits the two-minute mark. No hold music. No "please listen carefully as our menu options have changed." No callback promised and quietly forgotten.
That voice belongs to Assort Health, a San Francisco company building specialty-specific voice AI for the part of medicine nobody puts on a billboard: the phone line. By mid-2026 its agents have worked across more than 20 specialties and listened to over 150 million patient interactions. Health systems like John Muir Health and community centers like Golden Valley use it. Orthopedic groups credit it with revenue they were previously losing to busy signals.
Traditional IVR routes calls. AI voice agents resolve them.
- Assort Health's founding premise, printed on the homepageEvery great medical practice has a bottleneck it rarely talks about: the front desk. Phone lines clog. Patients abandon calls. Appointments that should have been booked simply evaporate, and with them, revenue and access. The industry's answer for thirty years was the phone tree - press 1 for billing, press 2 to be transferred to a voicemail box that is full.
The irony is that medicine spent a fortune digitizing everything except the moment a worried person actually reaches out. The EHR knows the patient. The scheduler is overwhelmed. The two rarely meet in time. Assort Health's founders looked at that gap and saw the one problem worth solving: not answering the phone faster, but resolving what the call was about.
What's really interesting about our space is that voice AI and LLMs have been around for a while. But healthcare is so complicated.
- Jeff Liu, Co-Founder & Co-CEOComplexity is the whole point. A general-purpose chatbot can sound pleasant. It cannot tell a pediatric scheduling rule from an orthopedic pre-op protocol. Assort's bet was that voice AI for medicine has to be built per specialty, or it doesn't work at all.
Assort Health was founded in 2023 by Jon Wang and Jeff Liu. Wang had walked away from medical school years earlier to chase startups. Liu came from engineering at Facebook. One was in New York, the other in San Francisco, and they spent roughly two years getting to know the healthcare system intimately before the company found its footing. That patience is the unglamorous secret here: they studied the workflows before they automated them.
Their wager was contrarian in a market sprinting toward generic AI assistants. Instead of one agent that does everything passably, they built many agents that each do one specialty precisely. And they pointed the whole thing at a future that looks less like a call center and more like a system that reaches out before you have to.
Moving from a reactive system where you have to schedule a primary care appointment six months out, to a system that's more proactive.
- Jon Wang, Co-Founder & Co-CEOThe platform, branded Assort OS, plugs directly into the practice's EHR and practice-management software - Epic, Athena, Nextech, NextGen, Cerner - and treats the call as a job to finish, not a ticket to forward. It schedules, triages, verifies insurance, handles refills, manages waitlists, sends two-way texts, and follows up. The voice agent is tuned to the vocabulary and rules of the specialty it answers for.
An agentic AI patient-experience platform powering the journey from scheduling and intake through follow-up and outreach.
Phone agents tuned to 20+ specialties - orthopedics, dermatology, cardiology, women's health, pediatrics - that resolve calls instead of routing them.
Real-time hooks into Epic, Athena, Nextech, NextGen and Cerner to book, verify and update records as the conversation happens.
Two-way texting, chatbot, proactive outbound outreach, referral and fax automation, payment resolution and task management.
Jon Wang and Jeff Liu start Assort Health after roughly two years embedded in healthcare workflows.
Raises $22M-$26M led by First Round and Chemistry to scale the specialty-specific platform.
Closes $76M led by Lightspeed, bringing total funding to $102M. Galym Imanbayev joins the board.
Paul Ricci, founding CEO of Nuance, joins as board advisor - voice AI's elder statesman backing its newest chapter.
Platform surpasses 150M+ patient interactions across 20+ specialties, serving health systems and community centers.
Customers don't buy voice AI for novelty. They buy it because the abandonment rate drops and the revenue shows up. Here is what a handful of named practices reported after putting Assort on the line.
REPORTED IMPROVEMENTS AFTER DEPLOYING ASSORT HEALTH
Annapolis bar scaled to fit; actual figure is 220% capacity increase. Figures as reported by Assort Health from named customer deployments. Treat as company-provided, not independently audited.
Assort's stated aim is bigger than answering faster. It wants to move healthcare from reactive to proactive - from a system where you wait six months for a slot to one that reaches out before the problem grows. The phone call is the wedge. The end state is a patient who never falls through the cracks because there was no one to pick up.
Backers are betting on exactly that arc. Lightspeed led the $76M round and put partner Galym Imanbayev, M.D. on the board. Paul Ricci, who built Nuance into the giant of medical voice, signed on as advisor. Even Olympic speedskater Apolo Ohno is on the cap table. It is a coalition of people who understand that in healthcare, speed and precision are the same thing.
Every Patient, Precisely Guided.
- Assort Health company taglineA year ago, that dermatology patient calling after hours would have heard a recording and left a message no one would hear until morning. Maybe she'd have booked. Maybe she'd have given up, or driven to urgent care, or let the worry sit. The clinic would never have known it lost her.
Now the call is answered, the chart is open, the appointment is set, and the follow-up text is already scheduled. Multiply that by 150 million interactions and you start to see the shape of the bet: medicine doesn't get more human by hiring more people to staff phone trees. It gets more human when the system finally listens. Assort Health is wagering nine figures that the most overlooked interface in healthcare - the phone line - is also the one most worth fixing.
The hold music, it turns out, was never the point. Resolution was.