Breaking — Sandy Health raises pre-seed to build the operational backbone of healthcare Provider margins fell from 7% to 2% in five years Prior auth: 2.1 days vs. a 6.4-day industry average Collection accuracy climbs from 73% to 98% in six months Backed by physicians, not just VCs “Healthcare doesn’t need another workaround” — Diego Saavedra-Kloss Breaking — Sandy Health raises pre-seed to build the operational backbone of healthcare Provider margins fell from 7% to 2% in five years Prior auth: 2.1 days vs. a 6.4-day industry average Collection accuracy climbs from 73% to 98% in six months Backed by physicians, not just VCs “Healthcare doesn’t need another workaround” — Diego Saavedra-Kloss

SANDY HEALTH — San Francisco, CA
The financial layer for healthcare

Company Profile · Healthtech · AI

Meet Sandy

The cure for healthcare’s admin overload.

One AI platform connecting scheduling, eligibility, prior authorization, an AI scribe, and revenue intelligence — so providers can predict reimbursement before, during, and after every visit.

The Scene

It is 6:40 p.m. and the doctor is still fighting a fax machine.

Somewhere in America tonight: a clinician who trained for a decade, arguing with an insurance portal.

The patient left hours ago. The chart is done. What isn’t done is the paperwork behind the chart - the eligibility check that didn’t run, the prior authorization stuck in a queue, the claim that will bounce back next week for a code nobody flagged. This is the part of medicine no one puts on a recruiting poster. It is also, quietly, where the money goes to die.

Sandy Health starts from an uncomfortable observation: healthcare’s biggest problem right now isn’t medical. It’s operational. Providers deliver the care and then cannot reliably predict what they’ll be paid for it. Margins have thinned from roughly 7% in 2019 to about 2% in 2024. Meanwhile the insurers on the other side of every claim have been deploying AI at scale for years. The providers, too often, have a fax machine and a hopeful spreadsheet.

“Healthcare doesn’t need another workaround. It needs a platform that helps everything work together.”

That sentence, from founder Diego Saavedra-Kloss, is the whole company in one line. Sandy is built to be the connective tissue between verification, documentation, and reimbursement - the operational backbone that turns a chain of brittle handoffs into a single system. Not another dashboard bolted onto the pile. The layer underneath it.

The name is a tell, too. “Sandy” is friendly, almost domestic - the opposite of the acronym soup that healthcare software usually drowns in. The pitch to a clinic is not “buy our RCM suite.” It’s “meet Sandy, and get your evenings back.”

What Sandy Actually Does

Five steps, one revenue pipeline.

Most tools own a single slice of the visit. Sandy’s bet is that the slices only work when they talk to each other.

STEP 01

Scheduling & Intake

Surfaces financial context at booking - no-show risk, patient balances, payer mix, and projected revenue - before the visit is even confirmed.

STEP 02

Eligibility

Real-time automated insurance checks that catch coverage gaps before they quietly become denials.

STEP 03

Prior Authorization

Tracks each authorization from requirement to approval, killing the surprise denial before it happens.

STEP 04

AI Scribe

Captures structured documentation during the visit, flags undercoding, and surfaces the revenue everyone else misses.

STEP 05

Revenue Intelligence

Tracks expected versus actual collections with variance analysis - reimbursement calculated from real payer contracts, not guesses.

From guesswork to 98%.

Illustrative: revenue accuracy over six months, per Sandy Health

73%

78%

84%

90%

95%

98%

The Founder

He traded rockets for revenue cycles.

Diego Saavedra-Kloss

Founder & CEO

MIT — B.S. Aerospace Engineering
Before Sandy — Rad AI, LeapYear, New Dimension
The catalyst — survived cancer a decade ago
The lesson — the emergency was the paperwork

A decade before Sandy existed, Diego Saavedra-Kloss was the patient - fighting cancer and watching, from the inside, how much of healthcare’s dysfunction had nothing to do with medicine. The doctors were good. The system around them leaked time, money, and attention at every seam.

He came at the problem from an unlikely angle: aerospace engineering at MIT, then stints building AI and data infrastructure at Rad AI, LeapYear Technologies, and New Dimension. The through-line, in his telling, is making hard work feel human again - engineering that gives people back the part of the job they actually trained for.

Sandy’s founding advisor, Dr. Janelle Sunwoo of Leaf Medical, anchors the company in clinical reality. And the pre-seed backers are less a fund and more a faculty: physicians and operators from primary care, emergency medicine, anesthesia, home health, dentistry, and administration who have scaled care for tens of thousands of patients.