The AI that does the paperwork standing between a doctor's prescription and a patient's pharmacy.
The company's own logo mark - navy and blue, plain as a hospital wall. Behind it sits a dozen language models built to read charts, pick forms, and wait on hold with insurers so nobody else has to.
Here is a fact about American healthcare that is both extremely boring and quietly enormous: before a lot of patients can get the medication their doctor already decided they need, someone has to fill out a form and fax it to an insurance company.
Not a metaphorical fax. An actual one. A provider - or, more likely, a beleaguered person on the care team whose entire job this has become - digs up the correct prior-authorization form for the correct payer, fills it in by hand using information that already exists in the patient's chart, faxes it off, and then waits. Sometimes for a week. Sometimes the answer is "no," at which point the whole thing starts again as an appeal. This is called prior authorization, and it is the administrative equivalent of a toll booth that occasionally decides you can't drive on the road at all.
Develop Health, a company founded in 2022 and headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, looked at this toll booth and made a reasonable bet: that the entire ritual - the form-hunting, the hand-filling, the faxing, the hold music - could be handed to software. Specifically, to generative AI. The company describes itself as the first medication-access platform "fully architected around GenAI," which is the kind of phrase that would normally set off alarm bells, except that the thing it is automating is so tediously mechanical that you find yourself nodding along.
Today, providers waste hours of their day digging up the right forms, filling them out by hand, faxing them back and forth, and then waiting on hold with payers.Mel van Londen, Co-Founder & CEO
The pitch, then, is not that AI will diagnose your illness or replace your doctor. It is much narrower and, arguably, much more useful: the AI will read the chart that already exists, figure out what the insurer wants to hear, generate and submit the correct prior-authorization package, track its status, and - if the answer comes back "no" - draft and file the appeal. All of this plugs directly into the electronic health record, and the results get written back into the provider's system as structured data. The care team, ideally, does nothing.
Develop Health says this cuts the administrative work associated with medication access by roughly 83%, and shrinks the time-to-approval from about a week to under a day. Those are the company's own numbers, so apply the usual discount you apply to a company describing its own product. But the direction is unambiguous, and the market it is aimed at - the friction between what a doctor prescribes and what a patient can actually get - is one of the least glamorous and most genuinely broken corners of the whole system.
Develop Health does not run on one big model. It runs on more than a dozen purpose-built LLM pipelines, each pointed at a specific step of the medication-access journey.
Reads the patient chart in the EHR, selects the correct payer form, drafts and submits the prior-authorization package, and continuously tracks its status - no manual work from the care team.
Checks a patient's coverage, cost, and prior-auth requirements in real time - ideally before the prescription is even written - so surprises get caught upstream instead of at the pharmacy counter.
When a request is denied, the system reviews it, suggests care-plan tweaks that improve approval odds, and independently drafts and submits the appeal.
Develop Health's roots are in telehealth, and its customer list reflects it. Named customers include the direct-to-consumer health brands Ro, LifeMD, and Sunrise, along with the metabolic-health company Calibrate. These are companies that write a lot of prescriptions at scale and feel the prior-authorization tax more acutely than most.
The company says its platform supports hundreds of thousands of patients per month, and the founding team cites cumulative impact across 200,000+ patients and 6,000+ providers. That it can do this with a team of around two dozen people is the entire thesis in miniature: if the software carries the paperwork, a small company can operate at a scale that used to require a call center.
The near-term ambition is to move beyond pharmacy benefits into the medical benefit - the prior authorizations required for labs and imaging - which is a much larger and, if anything, even more paperwork-heavy world.
The two founders didn't discover the prior-auth problem from a spreadsheet. They watched it break things from inside provider-software companies.
Previously VP of Product at Canvas Medical, with earlier work spanning healthcare product and design. Saw firsthand how poor payer-provider communication delayed treatment - and decided to build the fix rather than write about it.
Technical co-founder with a background across provider-facing healthcare startups including Rupa Health. Leads the engineering behind Develop Health's multi-pipeline LLM architecture.
The founding team's experience spans Canvas Medical, Rupa Health, and IDEO - roughly a decade in healthcare between them.
In August 2025, Develop Health closed a $14.3M Series A, bringing total funding to roughly $17.6M.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | $14.3M | Aug 2025 | Wing Venture Capital (lead), Afore Capital, J Ventures, South Park Commons |
| Seed / earlier | ~$3.3M | 2022–2023 | South Park Commons and others |
| Total raised | ~$17.6M | — | — |
Figures compiled from company announcements and third-party databases (Crunchbase, PitchBook, MobiHealthNews). Some earlier-round details are approximate.
Mel van Londen and Benjamin Easton launch the company to automate medication access, drawing on years at provider-software startups.
An EHR-integrated system emerges, built on purpose-built LLM pipelines for coverage checks and prior authorization.
The product expands to review denials and independently draft and submit appeals - closing the loop on the workflow.
Wing Venture Capital leads a round that brings total funding to roughly $17.6M, with expansion into medical benefits (labs, imaging) on the roadmap.
It is tempting to be cynical about a startup whose product is, essentially, "AI that fills out insurance forms." But consider what the alternative looks like. A prescription that never gets filled because a prior authorization stalled is a clinical failure dressed up as an administrative one. The medicine existed. The doctor prescribed it. The patient qualified. And then a form sat in a queue.
Develop Health's bet is that this gap - between what medicine can do and what the paperwork lets it do - is worth a company. The risk, in a regulated and safety-critical domain, is the usual one for generative AI: what happens when the model is confident and wrong? The company's answer is architectural - many narrow pipelines rather than one general model, plus the structured hand-back into the EHR that keeps a human in the loop. Whether that holds up at scale is the question every buyer, and every investor, is really underwriting.
For now, the numbers point one way and the customers are telehealth companies with a lot to gain. Develop Health is not trying to reinvent the doctor. It is trying to make the fax machine obsolete. In American healthcare, that turns out to be a surprisingly large ambition.
Product demos and founder interviews (search on YouTube - no official channel confirmed):
Official channels & coverage:
It automates medication access - verifying insurance coverage, filing prior authorizations, tracking status, and drafting appeals - using AI that plugs directly into a provider's EHR.
Mel van Londen (CEO) and Benjamin Easton (CTO) founded the company in 2022. Both came from provider-software startups, including Canvas Medical and Rupa Health.
About $17.6M total, including a $14.3M Series A in August 2025 led by Wing Venture Capital, with Afore Capital, J Ventures, and South Park Commons participating.
Digital health and virtual care providers including Ro, LifeMD, Sunrise, and Calibrate. The platform supports hundreds of thousands of patients per month.
The company reports cutting medication-access administrative work by roughly 83% and reducing approval times from about a week to under a day.
Sources: businesswire.com · mobihealthnews.com · medcitynews.com · crunchbase.com · develophealth.ai. Figures are company-reported or from third-party databases and may be approximate.