The least glamorous problem in healthcare, on purpose
Home health agencies live and die by a form most people have never heard of. It is called OASIS, and every visit to a patient's living room generates a stack of it - diagnosis codes, plans of care, quality reviews. Get it wrong and reimbursement stalls. Get it slow and cash flow chokes. Eric Steege looked at that pile of clerical drudgery and saw a company.
That company is Olli Health, the Madison, Wisconsin startup where Steege is cofounder and chief executive. Olli uses artificial intelligence to handle the coding, OASIS review, and clinical documentation that sit between a nurse's visit and an agency getting paid. The pitch is unsentimental: do the same work as traditional coding vendors, but roughly four times faster and at half the cost. By late 2025 the company said it served more than 100 home health agencies and had pulled its 90-day average turnaround time under 24 hours.
It is not the kind of idea that wins applause at a demo day. Nobody dreams of revenue cycle management. But that is exactly the point, and it is a tell about how Steege thinks. He went looking for a problem that was dull, expensive, and unavoidable - the sort of thing every agency hates and nobody has fixed - and he planted a flag there.
"We're creating an integrated platform that connects the point of care through final coding and quality review, ensuring maximum reimbursement accuracy and compliance at every step."
Before Olli: shipping AI at Amazon
Steege did not arrive in healthcare by way of a hospital. He came from Amazon, where he spent more than four years as a product lead on the Alexa generative AI and subscriptions team. His signature project there was launching Alexa's first direct-to-consumer paid subscription - one aimed squarely at older adults and the people who care for them.
Read that sentence twice and the through-line snaps into focus. The audience he built for at Amazon - seniors and caregivers - is the same population that home health agencies serve. He moved from putting a friendly voice in front of older adults to fixing the unglamorous machinery that keeps care for those adults financially viable. The customer changed from the consumer to the agency, but the human at the center stayed the same.
Olli's claim, in three bars
Figures as stated by the company. Bars are illustrative.
The team behind the founder
Steege did not build Olli alone, and the founding lineup says a lot about the bet. He co-founded the company in 2023 with Joe Freudenthal, who brings more than two decades in senior care and once ran a home health agency as president, and Jeremy Gordon, a former startup founder and CTO who holds a Stanford undergraduate degree and a UC Berkeley PhD in computational cognitive science. One cofounder knows the industry from the inside, one knows how machines reason, and Steege knows how to ship a product. The combination - deep domain knowledge plus advanced AI - is the exact phrase investors used when explaining why they wrote the check.
A $10M round, and a plan to swallow the whole workflow
In November 2025, Olli Health closed a $10M Series A led by Industry Ventures, with participation from Cannage Capital, Equitage Ventures, Tau Ventures, and Arkitekt Ventures. The round brought total funding to roughly $13M. Earlier in the year, a case study with an agency called First Choice had already put a public number on the savings AI-driven coding could deliver - useful proof when you are asking investors to believe a Madison startup can reorder a national back office.
The money has a clear destination. Olli started as a managed coding and quality review service. Steege wants to extend it into an end-to-end platform that begins at the point of care - guiding nurses and therapists through assessments with real-time quality checks - and runs all the way through final coding and review. The ambition he has voiced is bracing: make the platform EHR agnostic, push autocoding and autoreview toward roughly five-minute turnaround, and aim for accuracy he describes as better than human.
Managed coding and quality review - the work agencies most want off their plate.
Clinical documentation at the point of care, with real-time quality checks.
EHR-agnostic autocoding with ~5-minute turnaround and "better than human" accuracy.
A 2024 partnership with Axxess to elevate home health coding and quality review.
There is a quiet geographic story here too. Olli is not in San Francisco or Boston. It is in Madison, a city better known for a university and a capitol dome than for healthtech. Building an AI company in the Midwest, close to the home health agencies it serves rather than the venture capital it courts, is its own kind of statement. Steege also gives back to that local ecosystem, sitting on the Executive Advisory Board of the Erdman Center for Operations & Technology Management at the Wisconsin School of Business.
The PatternWhat the work reveals
Look at the arc and a discipline emerges. A product manager who chose subscriptions for seniors over flashier consumer bets. A founder who chose coding paperwork over a sexier slice of healthcare. A CEO who picked Madison over the coasts and surrounded himself with a home health veteran and a cognitive scientist rather than a roster of generalists. None of these are the obvious move. All of them point the same direction: toward the boring, load-bearing problems where software can actually change the math.
The unglamorous frontier of healthcare is paperwork, billing, and the gap between a visit and a payment. It is where agencies bleed time and money, and where almost nobody wants to build. Eric Steege is building there on purpose - and a growing list of agencies, and now a roomful of investors, are betting he is right.