He spent ten years reading hospital contracts nobody else could parse. Then he turned that into software.
Co-Founder & CEO · Turquoise Health · San Diego, CA
Ask Chris Severn what a knee replacement costs and he will not shrug. For most of a decade his job was to know - to model the managed-care contracts between hospitals and insurers, line by buried line, and find the places where the math quietly broke. He describes the knowledge as near-doctoral, except the doctorate is in hospital claims, a subject with no fan club and enormous stakes.
Most founders chase a market. Severn chased a fact: that a price you can read changes who holds the power. Turquoise Health is the machine he built to make that fact unavoidable - first by publishing the numbers, now by rewiring the contracts that produce them.
Turquoise Health started as a public mirror. When federal rules in late 2020 forced hospitals to post their negotiated prices, most of that data landed as unreadable spreadsheets dumped onto obscure web pages. Severn's company scooped it up, cleaned it, and stacked it into a central database where, for the first time, anyone could compare what one hospital charged against another.
That was the opening move. The $40 million Series C Turquoise announced in March 2026, led by Oak HC/FT with Andreessen Horowitz, Adams Street Partners, and Yosemite, funds a bigger ambition: not just showing the prices, but running the contracts that produce them. Severn calls it the operating system for healthcare contracts and payments.
The pitch is specific. Instead of taking a messy contract at face value, Turquoise rewrites the language so a price calculation can be encoded directly into the agreement. Payment rules become code. Disputes, manual reconciliation, and the paper-heavy back-and-forth that eats hospital revenue cycles start to disappear. "We just don't think that should exist," he says of all that waste. UNC Health and Loma Linda University Health are among the 40-plus organizations already running contracts this way.
It is a quietly radical claim in an industry that has profited from confusion for generations. Severn's bet is that once the data sits in fixed columns and fields, it stops being negotiable folklore. "This data finally becomes irrefutable," he says, "because they have to set schemas in columns and fields where you can't really brush it away."
We're working backwards towards complete healthcare financial clarity. Our vision is to eliminate the financial complexity of healthcare.
Chris SevernHe is trying to make the price tag the boring part again.
Healthcare in the United States has a strange feature: the price is often the last thing anyone learns. A patient agrees to a procedure, a hospital and an insurer settle the bill behind closed doors, and the negotiated rate stays hidden inside contracts written in a private dialect. Severn spent years inside those documents. He knew the opacity was not an accident - it was the business model.
When federal price-transparency rules took effect in 2020, hospitals were required to publish their negotiated rates. Compliance, technically. Useful, not really. The disclosures arrived as enormous, inconsistent files that almost no one could read. Severn saw the gap between "posted" and "usable" and built a company to live in it. Turquoise gathered the disclosures, standardized them, and turned a regulatory obligation into something an actual human - or an employer, or a competing hospital - could query.
That standardization is the lever. Once a price has to live in a fixed column with a fixed label, it can be compared, audited, and argued with. The numbers stop being folklore and start being facts. That shift, from buried to irrefutable, is the whole thesis of the company.
Turquoise is unique in our focus on taking the waste attributed to a contract and actually working on making language better.
Chris SevernMost rivals take the contract at face value. He rewrites it.
Severn arrived at UC Berkeley to study Spanish and Portuguese. The languages did not stick as a career; the entrepreneurial itch did, and he switched to business. The detour into healthcare came through the least glamorous door imaginable - consulting on hospital underpayments and Medicare pricing, the kind of work where you learn exactly how a claim is built and exactly where it leaks.
A summer at Amgen gave him a taste of health economics. A decade at Cloudmed, modeling managed-care contracts as a product manager, gave him the fluency. Then he founded Arcosta, building machine learning to chase payment integrity inside hospital revenue cycles. "I finally found my way back to healthcare," he has said. "It just keeps calling you back."
Turquoise itself began as something else entirely. Severn teamed up with software engineer Adam Geitgey to build ML models that flagged payment variances in hospital surgeries. When the pandemic cratered surgical volumes in early 2020, the original product lost its fuel. The price-transparency regulations arriving that same year offered a new one. They pivoted. The pairing of a claims obsessive and a serious engineer is, in Severn's words, the whole point: "You marry the subject matter expertise with the engineering and product prowess and you get hopefully a pretty fearsome duo."
The pivot has a tidy logic in hindsight, but it was really a bet placed in the dark. A regulation nobody had figured out how to use met two founders who happened to be uniquely equipped to use it. Severn's decade of contract fluency told him what the data meant; Geitgey's engineering told them how to wrangle it at scale. The fearsome duo was less a slogan than a job description.
It would have been easy to stop at the database. Price comparison alone is a business. But Severn frames transparency as the means, not the end - the point is to fix the transaction itself. With the Series C, Turquoise is moving up the stack from observing prices to running the agreements that create them.
Here is the mechanism. A managed-care contract is, underneath, a set of rules for how money should move. In practice those rules live in dense prose that humans interpret, disagree about, and litigate. Turquoise consolidates contract management onto a single platform where providers and payers can standardize that language, simplify the price calculations, and encode the payment rules directly into the agreement. When the rules are code, the math runs the same way for everyone, and the expensive choreography of disputes and manual reconciliation has less reason to exist.
Severn's word for the target is "healthcare transactions the way they should be" - guaranteed upfront pricing, minimal administrative overhead. He is candid about the ambition: complete pricing clarity for shoppable medical services, in his view, can be standard by 2028, with modern AI doing work that used to require armies of analysts. Forty-plus organizations, UNC Health and Loma Linda among them, have signed on to find out whether he is right.
Interns at Amgen in global health economics; consults on hospital underpayments and Medicare pricing.
Spends 10+ years at Cloudmed as a product manager modeling hospital managed-care contracts.
Founds Arcosta, a machine learning and automation company for hospital revenue cycle and payment integrity.
Co-founds Turquoise Health with engineer Adam Geitgey; pivots from surgical ML into healthcare price transparency.
Raises a $40M Series C led by Oak HC/FT, pushing total funding to roughly $95M and expanding into contracts and payments.
"This data finally becomes irrefutable because they have to set schemas in columns and fields where you can't really brush it away."
"You marry the subject matter expertise with the engineering and product prowess and you get hopefully a pretty fearsome duo."
"Turquoise is unique in our focus on taking the waste attributed to a contract and actually working on making language better."
"I finally found my way back to healthcare. It just keeps calling you back."
Aggregated price-transparency disclosures from thousands of US hospitals into one queryable database, making scattered data usable for the first time.
Including a $40M Series C in March 2026 led by Oak HC/FT, with Andreessen Horowitz, Adams Street Partners, and Yosemite participating.
Health systems including UNC Health and Loma Linda University Health now manage contract language and payment rules on the platform.
Testified before Congress on healthcare price transparency, advocating for the rules his company helps make actionable.
Believes guaranteed, upfront pricing for shoppable medical services can be standard by 2028, with AI doing the heavy lifting.
Built Turquoise to serve patients, providers, payers, employers, and government - a multi-sided platform, not a single-audience tool.