Founder · Operator · Healthcare Finance
Jack
Jack
O'Hara
He sat in the CIO chair at two billion-dollar health systems and kept seeing the same blind spot: nobody could read the money in real time. So he built the eyes.
He sat in the CIO chair at two billion-dollar health systems and kept seeing the same blind spot: nobody could read the money in real time. So he built the eyes.
A rural clinic once closed because nobody could explain its numbers fast enough. Patients started driving hours for care. Jack O'Hara never forgot it.
Today Jack O'Hara runs Translucent, an AI-native financial operating system for hospitals and medical groups. The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity: give every healthcare operator their own AI financial analyst - one that answers any money question, builds any forecast, and never sleeps. Ask it why a service line slipped last month and it pulls the threads across operational, clinical, and financial data until the root cause is sitting on the table.
That sounds obvious until you learn how the work actually gets done inside a health system. Finance teams spend most of their hours stitching spreadsheets together, reconciling claims, and chasing a number that was already stale by the time they found it. The analysis - the part a human is actually good at - comes last, if at all. O'Hara watched this play out from the inside for the better part of a decade, and he watched it cost real things. Not abstractions. A clinic. A community. Hours in a car for a sick person.
He started Translucent in 2024 in New York City with co-founder Max Jones. The company describes its product as the first agentic AI platform built exclusively for healthcare finance: it consolidates the messy, siloed data of a provider organization into one continuously-monitored view, then surfaces real-time insight and root-cause analysis the moment a signal moves. No quarterly scramble. No 40-tab workbook. A chat box, an answer, a decision.
Investors moved fast. Translucent emerged in August 2025 with a $7 million oversubscribed seed round led by Virtue, with NEA, FPV, and Redesign Health along for the ride. Seven months later, in March 2026, the company announced a $27 million Series A led by GV - Google's venture arm. O'Hara has said the round was preempted and oversubscribed, which is the polite founder way of saying the term sheet showed up before he went looking for one.
What makes the story land is not the cap table. It is that O'Hara is not a finance person who discovered healthcare, or a technologist who discovered a market. He is an operator who lived the problem with his hands, then refused to accept that it was unsolvable. He likes to tell founders one thing: focus relentlessly on a real, urgent problem for your customers. He earned the right to say it.
Source: Translucent Series A announcement, March 2026
Most people build a company because they read about a market. O'Hara built one because he kept getting paged about it.
Ran technology across a slice of one of New York's largest health systems - the first proving ground for managing scale and complexity in a clinical setting.
Reconstructed the operational P&L for every single department, treating financial reporting like a data-engineering problem rather than an accounting chore.
At the multi-billion-dollar value-based care group, he rebuilt the financial claims system from the ground up while leading 300+ across product, engineering, and AI.
"Hospitals and clinics shouldn't have to choose between financial health and patient health." JACK O'HARA, ON WHY TRANSLUCENT EXISTS
From the server room of a hospital to a GV term sheet in under two years of company life.
Eight years leading IT and transformation across provider organizations, including CIO roles at ChenMed and Springfield Clinic and a regional CIO seat at Mount Sinai.
O'Hara and co-founder Max Jones start the company in New York City to give healthcare its own AI financial analyst.
An oversubscribed round led by Virtue, with NEA, FPV, and Redesign Health. The platform is already powering workflows tied to hundreds of millions in customer revenue.
A preempted, oversubscribed round just seven months after the seed - aimed squarely at what O'Hara calls healthcare's existential financial crisis.
"Finance teams were spending most of their time pulling data together instead of actually making decisions."
ON THE PROBLEM"We've built an agentic AI platform that automates the manual analysis finance teams historically had to do by hand."
ON THE PRODUCT"Healthcare finance is incredibly complex, and from the outside it's not always obvious how manual a lot of the work still is."
ON FUNDRAISING"Focus relentlessly on solving a real, urgent problem for your customers."
ON BUILDINGTwo graduate degrees, one university, an unusual blend of business and bedside.
The business half of the equation - the language of operators, boards, and capital.
The clinical half - the fluency that lets him speak to CFOs and care teams in the same breath.
20 hospital bankruptcies. 23 closures. More than 700 rural hospitals at risk.
Those were last year's numbers, and they are the backdrop against which O'Hara argues his case. Healthcare spending was projected to hit $5.6 trillion - a figure large enough to lose a clinic inside the rounding error. His bet is simple and stubborn: when an operator can see the money the moment it moves, fewer of those clinics have to close. He has watched what happens when they do.