The broker who decided to rebuild the thing he sells
Founder · CEO · YC F25
Santosh Vallabhaneni
He spent a decade learning where healthcare hides its prices. Now he is turning the lights on - one text message at a time.
He spent a decade learning where healthcare hides its prices. Now he is turning the lights on - one text message at a time.
Open your phone. Type a symptom. A few messages later you have a diagnosis, a prescription if you need one, and an appointment with a doctor who happens to be both excellent and a third of the price of the one down the street. No forms. No hold music. No surprise bill three weeks later.
That is the product Santosh Vallabhaneni is building at Rovi Health, the company he co-founded in 2025 and runs as CEO. Rovi is a text-first care platform for employers. Patients get care over text or video, while AI agents read the clinical picture, comb millions of price and quality data points across in-network providers, and book the appointment end to end. The pitch to the people who pay for all of it - employers - is blunt: cut 10 to 20 percent of your annual health spend, and give your team a benefit they actually like.
Rovi landed in Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch with the kind of traction most startups only promise. Before the public launch, it had already signed contracts covering thousands of employees across multiple employers for the 2025-2026 plan year. The company is small - a team of three when it launched - but the order book was not.
What makes the whole thing credible is not the AI. Everyone has AI now. It is the fact that the person pointing it at the problem has, by an unusually exact route, learned every part of the machine he is trying to fix.
Rovi's founding insight fits on a price tag. Identical care, billed in the same network, can cost three or four times more depending only on which building you walk into. Hospital systems buy up primary care, prices stay hidden, and employees pick blind. Rovi makes the cheaper, often better, option the obvious one.
Up to 3.5x more for the same image.
An $18,000 swing on one operation.
“High-quality, affordable healthcare to employees through text. Employers cut 10-20% of their annual spend.”
Santosh studied at the University of Pennsylvania. The interesting part of his story is not the diploma. It is the order in which he picked up the three skills that Rovi quietly requires.
First came go-to-market. As an early employee at AngelList, he led a 30-person go-to-market and customer success team during the years the firm was reshaping how startups raise money. That is where he learned to sell something new to people who did not yet know they needed it.
Then came hospitals. At Cedar, he was General Manager of the patient affordability products and scaled them to millions in annual recurring revenue, closing enterprise deals with some of the largest health systems in the country. Affordability is the polite industry word for the gap between what a treatment costs and what a patient can actually pay. He spent years staring straight into it.
Then came the license. Santosh is a licensed health insurance broker - a credential most tech founders in the space never bother to earn. He knows how the policies are written, priced, and sold, because he is allowed to write, price, and sell them.
Stack those three and Rovi stops looking like a leap and starts looking like a conclusion. Go-to-market tells you how to win employers. The Cedar years tell you how hospitals bill. The broker's license tells you how insurance actually works. Most founders pick one and hire for the rest. He arrived holding all three.
Rovi is a family operation in the literal sense. Santosh runs the business as CEO. His brother Tarun runs the engineering as CTO. They describe themselves, plainly, as brothers on a mission to build AI-native health insurance that members genuinely appreciate.
Tarun brings the half of the problem his brother does not. He holds a master's in AI and high-performance computing from the University of Chicago and a biology degree from Cornell, and before healthcare he built foundational AI models that predicted extreme weather. Storm systems and claims systems have more in common than you would think: both are enormous, messy data problems where the right model beats the loudest opinion.
One brother knows how the money and the policies move. The other knows how to make a model find the signal. Healthcare, it turns out, is exactly the kind of problem that needs both at the same table - and few negotiations are shorter than the one you have with your own brother.
In 2025, employer health costs jumped roughly 9 percent - the worst single-year hike in a decade. For a thousand-person company, that one number meant absorbing over a million dollars in new annual cost. The usual responses are grim: cut benefits or redesign the plan, both slow and both resented by the people who have to live with them.
Rovi's answer is to attack the waste instead of the worker. When the same care can cost three times more in the next building over, there is enormous room to spend less without anyone getting less. The AI does the part humans cannot: reading the clinical need, scoring every in-network option on price and quality, and handling the scheduling so the patient never feels the machinery.
And the incentives are flipped on purpose. Choose the high-value provider and Rovi reimburses your copay and waives your deductible. The cheaper path is the rewarded path. For once, the patient and the payer want the same thing.
2025's ~9% hike was the worst in a decade - over $1M in new cost for a 1,000-person firm.
AI scores every in-network option on price and quality, then books it for you.
Pick high-value care, get your copay back and deductible waived.
He co-founded the company with his own brother. The CTO shares his last name and his childhood.
He is a licensed health insurance broker - he is rebuilding, from scratch, a product he is legally allowed to sell.
His co-founder once built AI to forecast extreme weather. Now that same instinct forecasts the cheapest good doctor.