Company Profile · Health & AI
Carbon Health
The chain of clinics that decided a doctor's visit should feel like opening an app - and then wrote the software to make it true.
The chain of clinics that decided a doctor's visit should feel like opening an app - and then wrote the software to make it true.
Above: the logo of a company that put a software team and a stethoscope in the same room and refused to apologize for it.
Walk into a Carbon Health clinic and the first thing you notice is what's missing. No clipboard. No fax machine wheezing in the corner. No receptionist asking you to spell your insurance carrier for the third time. You booked the visit on your phone this morning, the room knew you were coming, and the doctor is looking at you instead of a keyboard - because an AI is quietly writing the chart for them.
That is the whole pitch, and Carbon Health spent more than a decade and over $600 million trying to make it ordinary. Today it runs more than 100 clinics across roughly 13 states, sees over a million patients, and operates the rare healthcare company that ships its own software. In February 2026 it filed for Chapter 11 - more on that later - but the clinics stayed open and the phones kept ringing. The idea, it turns out, is more durable than the balance sheet.
“Most clinics rent their software. Carbon Health writes it.”
The detail that explains everything elseThe medicine, mostly, works. The experience of getting it is where things fall apart. Records that live in a system you can't open. Appointments booked weeks out for problems that needed attention today. Doctors who spend more of the visit typing than listening, because the electronic health record - the supposed upgrade - was designed for billing departments, not human beings.
Here is the irony Carbon Health kept pointing at: the same person who can summon a car, a dinner, and a mortgage rate from a glowing rectangle has to phone a clinic and wait on hold to learn whether their throat culture came back. The technology existed everywhere except the exam room.
“The technology existed everywhere except the exam room.”
The gap Carbon Health was built to closeEren Bali grew up in a village in southeastern Turkey and co-founded Udemy, the online-learning marketplace that taught millions of strangers how to do nearly everything. Healthcare was a strange second act. But Bali, along with engineer Tom Berry and physician Greg Burrell, made a specific and slightly stubborn bet in 2015: that you could not fix the experience of care by buying better software. You had to build the clinic and the software together, as one thing.
It was the harder path - and arguably the less fashionable one. Plenty of health startups picked a lane: an app, or a clinic, or an insurance plan. Carbon Health picked all of them at once. In 2018 it merged with Direct Urgent Care, adding emergency physician Caesar Djavaherian as a fourth co-founder and a dose of real-world clinical operations to the Silicon Valley ambition.
Own the full stack - the front desk, the exam room, the record, the app - and you can finally make the seams disappear. Investors agreed, repeatedly and expensively. Bullpen and Two Sigma seeded it; Dragoneer, Blackstone, and eventually CVS Health wrote the big checks.
“You can't buy your way to a better experience. You have to build the clinic and the code as one thing.”
The founding wager, paraphrasedStrip away the funding headlines and Carbon Health is, at heart, three things stapled into one: clinics you can walk into, an app you can live in, and an electronic health record that connects them. Book a same-day appointment, hop on a video visit, message your provider, refill a prescription, read your own lab results - all on the same record, whether you showed up in person or in a browser tab.
The flashiest piece arrived in 2023: hands-free charting. It's a GPT-4-based notes assistant wired directly into Carbon's EHR. It listens to the visit, drafts the clinical note, and hands the provider something to approve rather than something to type from scratch. The promise isn't science fiction - it's just time. Time the doctor spends looking at you instead of a screen.
Get urgent care for a sprain at 7pm. Manage a chronic condition without re-explaining your history to every new face. Get pediatric and adult care, mental health, workplace health, and lab work routed through one app. Carbon Health's bet was that convenience and good medicine aren't opposites - and that the EHR, of all things, is where that fight is won or lost.
“The AI writes the note so the doctor can keep looking at the patient.”
Hands-free charting, in one sentenceReported time to produce a complete medical chart - manual vs. Carbon's AI charting
Ideas are cheap; adoption is the receipt. Carbon Health grew to more than 100 clinics across roughly 13 states and over a million patients - not a pilot, a footprint. During the pandemic it became one of the largest private COVID-19 testing operators in the country, the kind of operational stress test that either breaks a young company or proves it.
Then, in early 2023, CVS Health did something telling: its venture arm led a $100 million round and partnered to pilot Carbon's clinic model inside CVS retail stores. When the largest pharmacy chain in America wants your urgent-care experience under its own roof, the thesis has graduated from pitch deck to proof.
“When CVS wants your clinic inside its stores, the pitch has become proof.”
On the 2023 CVS Health partnershipGrowth funded by a long bull market is a wonderful thing right up until the market changes its mind. Post-pandemic, demand shifted and capital for healthcare companies got expensive. In February 2026 Carbon Health filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas, listing estimated liabilities between $100 million and $500 million and securing up to $19.5 million in debtor-in-possession financing to keep operating.
It's a dual-track restructuring - a court-supervised sale running alongside a plan to swap debt for equity - and the clinics have stayed open throughout. Bankruptcy isn't an obituary; for many companies it's a reset. The question Carbon Health is now answering in real time is whether the idea can outlast the capital structure that built it.
Carbon Health's stated mission is unglamorous in the best way: make world-class healthcare accessible to everyone by stitching diagnostics, virtual visits, prescriptions, and records into one platform a normal person can actually use. Not a moonshot. A floor. The radical part isn't the technology - it's the insistence that the boring stuff, the scheduling and the charting and the records, is exactly where dignity in healthcare gets won or lost.
“The radical idea was that convenience and good medicine were never actually enemies.”
Carbon Health's quiet thesisEvery health system in the country is now staring at the same question Carbon Health asked a decade ago: what happens when the AI writes the note? Carbon didn't just speculate about it - it shipped it, to every clinic and every provider, and watched 88% of the output get accepted as-is. Whatever happens to the corporate entity, that experiment is now part of the record.
So walk back into that clinic. The clipboard is still gone. The doctor is still looking at you, not the keyboard. Carbon Health may have hit the wall every fast-growing healthtech company eventually meets, but the room it built - quiet, software-shaped, patient-facing - is the one a lot of American healthcare is slowly moving toward. The company proved the room could exist. The rest of the industry is still doing the math.
“They proved the room could exist. Everyone else is still doing the math.”
The closing argumentWatch & listen: search YouTube for the Carbon Health app & clinic product demo, and Eren Bali's founder interviews (including the “Raise the Line” conversation) for the story in his own words.