The same procedure can cost 10x more one street over. Rovi Health made an AI that knows the difference - and texts you the cheaper door.
It is a Tuesday, and somewhere an employee just got told she needs an MRI. She does not open a 40-page benefits PDF. She opens her texts.
On the other end is a nurse - guided by software that has quietly read terabytes of pricing and quality data across every in-network provider in her plan. The scan she was about to schedule at the hospital would run about $2,500. The imaging center ten minutes away does the identical scan for roughly $700. Rovi Health knows this. In the time it takes to reply, it books the cheaper one, and her deductible gets waived for choosing it. No lecture. No app to download. Just a better answer, arriving the way answers arrive now - as a message you can read in line for coffee.
That is the whole company, really. Rovi Health (Y Combinator, Fall 2025) is an AI-powered care concierge for employer health plans. It treats common conditions over text or video, steers members toward high-value in-network care, and pays them - through copay reimbursements and waived deductibles - for picking the smart option. Employers, in return, watch 10 to 20 percent of their annual healthcare spend simply stop leaking out the side.
In-network prices for identical procedures vary wildly inside a single zip code. Not because one is better - price and quality, Rovi likes to point out, are not correlated. Just because that's how American healthcare prices things.
Figures cited by Rovi Health at launch. Rovi routes members toward the lower-cost, high-quality option - and rewards them for it.
Price and quality are not correlated in healthcare.- Rovi Health, on the uncomfortable fact its business is built on
Members message a nurse-guided care team. Common conditions get treated over text or video - no appointment, no lobby, no forms.
AI agents read terabytes of in-network price and quality data, recommend the high-value provider, and handle the scheduling for you.
Choose the smart option and Rovi reimburses copays and waives deductibles. Saving money stops being a chore and starts being a perk.
A thousand-person company faces over $1M in new healthcare costs a year. The old choices were grim: cut benefits, or raise premiums. Rovi offers a third door - keep the benefit, reroute the care.
Directional illustration based on Rovi's stated 10-20% savings claim - not a guaranteed result.
Former GM of Cedar's patient-affordability products, where he sold millions in ARR to the country's largest health systems. Earlier, he led GTM and customer success at AngelList. He is also a licensed health insurance broker - which is to say, he has read the fine print so you don't have to.
Built AI weather-prediction models during his master's in AI at the University of Chicago, with a biology degree from Cornell. The person who once taught machines to forecast storms now teaches them to forecast a $2,500 bill - and reroute around it.
Our employee never learned that the hospital MRI would have cost three-and-a-half times as much. She never had to. The scan happened at the imaging center, the results were fine, and her deductible went untouched. Multiply that by a workforce, by a plan year, by every quiet decision made before a bill was ever printed, and you get the number Rovi keeps repeating: 10 to 20 percent.
The pitch isn't that healthcare should be disrupted. It's smaller and harder to argue with - that the cheaper, better option was usually right there, one street over, and all anyone needed was a nurse who would text back. Rovi Health is a bet that fixing the system might start with something as ordinary as a good reply. So far, thousands of employees are along for the conversation.