Jeffrey
Morelli

Walk into a specialty clinic and the friction is invisible but everywhere: portals, faxes, phone trees, and the long wait before a patient is even allowed to be treated. Jeffrey Morelli built Silna Health to make that wait disappear.

Silna Health, the New York company Morelli co-founded in August 2023, calls itself the industry's first Care Readiness Platform. In plain terms, it handles the administrative work that decides whether a patient is actually cleared to receive care - prior authorizations, benefit checks, eligibility verification, and ongoing insurance monitoring - and it does that work up front, before the visit, with AI doing the heavy lifting.

The pitch is deceptively simple. Providers spend enormous amounts of time confirming that insurance will cover a treatment, chasing approvals through systems that, as Morelli likes to point out, have barely changed in half a century. Silna automates those front-end workflows across a wide range of payors, cutting a process that used to take about 30 minutes per patient down to roughly 30 seconds. The company says it has helped more than 50,000 patients get cleared for care, a number it doubled in the first quarter of 2025, and reports a Net Promoter Score of 89 - a figure almost unheard of in healthcare software.

What makes Silna more than a workflow tool is the category Morelli is trying to define. "Care readiness" reframes a pile of disconnected billing tasks as a single question: is this patient actually ready to be seen, paid for, and treated without a denial down the line? By stitching those tasks together and running them through large language models, Silna aims to remove the delays and denials that create worse outcomes for patients and unnecessary costs for the system.

The reason Silna exists is personal. Morelli is the son of a nurse who spent four decades delivering care in nearly every kind of setting - a ski-hill clinic, a newborn intensive care unit, a role as a diabetes care coordinator. For most of that career she loved the work. For the last five years, according to the account Morelli has shared, she was worn down by a system that had grown so complex it left providers doing mountains of paperwork after hours and fighting uphill battles for pay and for their patients.

That frustration became the company's founding brief: build proactive tools that handle prior authorizations, benefit checks, and insurance monitoring up front, so no patient is denied the care they need. It is a mission Morelli shares with his two co-founders.

Morelli's own route into the problem ran through startups, not hospitals. He worked at Nightingale, an autism-care business, then became the first sales hire at Truework, an income and employment verification platform where he learned how to move sensitive data reliably through systems that could not afford to be wrong. That experience - verification done carefully, at scale - maps almost directly onto what Silna does now.

Silna's founding team is a mix of old ties and hard-won product experience. Pavel Asparouhov was Morelli's neighborhood friend during their teenage years in Utah. He dropped out of Berkeley two years in, moved fast through fintech building AI upgrades into Ramp's expense-management product, and was named a Thiel Fellow. Sagar Jajoo, Silna's co-founder and COO, worked with Morelli at Truework, where he was the first product manager and built out the product organization.

Around them, the early team pulled talent from Ramp, Palantir, Meta, Amazon, Headway and Square - a bet that a hard, unglamorous problem could attract people who had built serious products elsewhere.

People who have worked with Morelli describe him as energetic and empathetic, and unusually hungry for feedback. He solicits input from almost everyone he encounters - neighbors, job candidates, even baristas. When employees suggested a different office layout, he personally rearranged the desks. New hires get a one-on-one with him during their first week.

That instinct shows up in how he talks about building in healthcare, where the usual startup playbook does not translate. The Silicon Valley mantra to move fast and break things, he has said, is simply not acceptable when a broken system means a patient waits longer for treatment. His job, as he frames it, is to hold two things at once: the urgency to fix a slow, outdated process, and the accuracy and trust that healthcare demands.