The New York company betting that if you make a hospital bill clear, patients will actually pay it - and everyone wins.
CEDAR. The company's mark - a stylized wordform for a platform built to make paying for care feel less like a maze. New York, NY.
In 2016, Florian Otto's wife fainted and ended up in a New York emergency room. The medical care was fine. What came afterward was not - a stream of paper statements, codes and balances that even a trained physician found impossible to parse. Otto, a former dentist-turned-oncologist who had already built and sold a Groupon-style marketplace in Brazil, saw a pattern he recognized: an industry that had never been forced to treat people like customers.
That frustration became Cedar. Co-founded with Ariel Lidow, the company started from a simple premise - that paying for healthcare should feel no more mysterious than booking a flight or streaming a show. The founders deliberately recruited from Amazon, Netflix and Expedia, importing a consumer-experience discipline into one of the least consumer-friendly corners of American life.
Nearly a decade later, Cedar is a patient financial platform used by more than 55 health systems and payers, has processed billions of dollars in patient payments, and reached a $3.2 billion valuation. The medical bill - the document almost nobody in healthcare wanted to own - turned out to be the whole business.
The bet is counterintuitive. Conventional wisdom says patients pay less when you make bills easier; Cedar argues the opposite. When statements are clear, personalized and paired with flexible options, people engage instead of ignoring, and providers collect more. At Novant Health, Cedar says the partnership added roughly $30 million in patient revenue in a single year while cutting time to payment resolution by 43%.
Cedar sits in a specific and unglamorous slice of the market: the patient financial experience, the last mile of the healthcare revenue cycle. It is not an insurer, not a hospital, not a clearinghouse. It is the software layer between all of them and the person who ultimately owes money - a position that became far more valuable as high-deductible plans pushed more cost directly onto patients.
The bigger risk is doing nothing.
Cedar's software connects to a provider's billing systems and turns raw balances into a personalized digital experience: clear statements, tailored reminders, out-of-pocket estimates before a visit, flexible payment plans, and help finding coverage or financial assistance a patient may not know they qualify for - including Medicaid, ACA plans, and unspent FSA/HSA dollars. Increasingly, an AI layer handles the conversation itself.
Hospitals, health systems and physician groups deploy Cedar to lift collections and patient satisfaction; the OODA Health acquisition extended it to insurers.
Confusing statements, surprise balances and endless phone trees drive patients to ignore bills - hurting both trust and provider revenue.
Cedar personalizes every interaction with data and design borrowed from consumer tech, rather than treating billing as a back-office afterthought.
End-to-end patient billing and payments - personalized statements, flexible plans, and payment across web, mobile and phone, including FSA/HSA support.
Sets payment expectations before care by personalizing out-of-pocket estimates and presenting the right options and calls to action.
Built on OODA Health, connects payer and provider data to surface financial assistance, eligibility and unused benefits for patients.
Agentic AI built with Twilio and trained on Cedar's billing data, answering patient questions 24/7 and targeting a 30% cut in inbound calls.
Cedar is a B2B SaaS company. It sells to providers and payers and earns platform fees tied to patient financial engagement and payment volume - positioning itself as revenue-cycle infrastructure that raises collections while improving the patient experience. Backed by Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund and Concord Health Partners, it has raised more than $590 million across four rounds.
Bar lengths are relative to round size. Figures from public reporting; revenue estimated at roughly $70M annually and not officially disclosed.
As deductibles rose and patients became the third-largest "payer" in American healthcare, a market formed around getting them to pay - clearly and fairly. Cedar competes with revenue-cycle and patient-payment players like Waystar, R1 RCM, Epic's MyChart billing, Flywire, InstaMed (JPMorgan) and Experian Health. Its differentiation is the consumer-experience layer and, increasingly, an AI stack purpose-built for billing rather than bolted on.
Florian Otto and Ariel Lidow start Cedar to modernize confusing, painful medical billing.
Cedar raises about $13M to build out its patient billing platform.
Roughly $36M as more health systems adopt Cedar Pay.
Cedar closes $102M and announces an innovation partnership with Novant Health.
A $3.2B valuation and a $425M acquisition connecting payers and providers.
The partnership adds $30M in patient revenue and cuts payment resolution time 43%.
Agentic AI purpose-built for healthcare billing, targeting a 30% cut in inbound calls.
Cedar is a healthcare financial technology company that helps providers and payers modernize patient billing, payments, coverage and support through a single intelligent platform.
Cedar was founded in 2016 in New York by Florian Otto (CEO) and Ariel Lidow, inspired by the confusing bills Otto's family received after an ER visit.
More than $590M across four rounds, including a $200M Series D in 2021 that valued the company at $3.2 billion.
Kora is Cedar's AI voice agent, built with Twilio and purpose-built for healthcare billing, designed to answer patient questions 24/7 and automate about 30% of inbound calls.
More than 55 healthcare providers and payers, including Novant Health, Providence, ChristianaCare, Yale New Haven Health, Highmark and Blue Cross Blue Shield plans.