prior-authorization
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Mel van Londen Is Teaching AI to Finish Healthcare's Paperwork
A former sailing captain, IDEO developer, and healthcare product leader has spent his career learning how complicated systems behave. At Develop Health, he is applying that education to the forms between a prescription and the person waiting for it.
Kshitij Jaggi Is Turning Oncology’s Back Office Into a System of Action
The RISA co-founder has spent a decade learning that software only matters when it moves work. His latest bet is an AI operating layer built for the forms, portals, policies, and handoffs that decide how quickly oncology operations can run.
Daniel Friedman
Daniel Friedman is the CEO and cofounder of Ethermed, a Philadelphia-based health technology company that uses AI and clinical reasoning to automate prior authorization for payers and providers. He founded the company in 2021 with engineer Michal Such after concluding that administrative friction in healthcare was a solvable software problem rather than a permanent cost of doing business. Under his leadership Ethermed raised an $8.5M Series A in 2026 (over $15M total), signed nine health-system customers, and now processes millions of authorizations a year, most of them fully automated in seconds.
Elad Ferber
Elad Ferber is the CEO and co-founder of Synthpop, a healthcare AI company that uses multi-agent automation to handle the administrative work behind patient care - referrals, prior authorizations, eligibility checks, documentation, and claims. A former Israeli Air Force Talpiot cadet and systems engineer with a Stanford MBA, Ferber previously co-founded the remote patient monitoring startup Spry Health, which was acquired by ZOLL Itamar in 2021. Founded in 2023 with CTO Jan Jannink, Synthpop has raised $23 million to date and pitches its AI as a labor solution that compresses 40-minute back-office tasks into under a minute.
Jeffrey Morelli
Jeffrey Morelli is the co-founder and CEO of Silna Health, a New York company building an AI-powered Care Readiness Platform that automates prior authorizations, benefit checks, eligibility verification, and insurance monitoring for specialty healthcare providers. The son of a career nurse, he was the first sales hire at income-verification startup Truework and earlier worked at autism-care company Nightingale before starting Silna in August 2023 with Pavel Asparouhov and Sagar Jajoo. Silna has raised $27 million from Accel and Bain Capital Ventures and has helped more than 50,000 patients get cleared for care. In 2025 Morelli was named among the Healthcare Technology Report's Top Healthcare Technology CEOs.
Sahir Jaggi
Sahir Jaggi is the founder and CEO of Forus, an AI-powered network (formerly known as Tandem) that automates the paperwork sitting between a doctor's prescription and a patient actually getting the drug. Forus emerged from stealth in May 2026 with $160M in funding at a $1B valuation from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Accel. Before Forus, Jaggi spent six years as a product leader at Oscar Health after studying biomedical engineering and computer science at Columbia.
Amber Nigam
Amber Nigam is the co-founder and CEO of basys.ai, a Harvard-born healthcare AI company teaching software to navigate one of medicine's most despised rituals: prior authorization. Trained on more than 10 million patient records and claims, basys.ai's engine encodes payer policy and automates up to 90% of authorization requests, aiming to give clinicians their time back and patients faster answers. A Harvard Health Data Science graduate, three-time patent inventor, and published researcher at venues like NeurIPS and ACL, Nigam came to Boston from Bareilly, India, after first building an ed-tech startup, kydots.ai. He has spoken at TEDx, Mayo Clinic, Harvard, and MIT, and has been named to multiple 40 Under 40 lists.
Dan Cornwell
Dan Cornwell is the founder and CEO of PrescriberPoint, a Boston-based, AI-enabled medication access platform that helps clinicians cut through the paperwork between writing a prescription and a patient actually getting their medicine. Spun out of Eli Lilly in partnership with BCG Digital Ventures, the company raised seed backing from an unusual coalition of would-be rivals - Lilly, Pfizer, Adobe and Mastercard. Before PrescriberPoint, Cornwell ran the nurse-staffing marketplace IntelyCare and advised companies on building disruptive businesses at BCG Digital Ventures. A Yale historian turned Wharton-trained operator, he keeps returning to the same problem: the messy gap between a good intention and a completed transaction.
Dan Rubin
Dan Rubin is President and CEO of PARx Solutions, a Burlington, Massachusetts healthtech company that runs the Prior Authorization Support System (PASS), a service that helps physician offices push prescriptions past insurer prior-authorization roadblocks at no cost to the practice. A chemical engineer by training who switched to building businesses, Rubin co-founded medication-adherence pioneer Adheris in 1993, ran it for fifteen years, then took the helm at PARx in 2012. He has spent three decades on a single problem: the gap between a doctor writing a prescription and a patient actually getting the medicine.
Diego Saavedra-Kloss
Diego Saavedra-Kloss is the founder and CEO of Sandy Health, a San Francisco startup building a financial intelligence platform for healthcare providers. An MIT-trained aerospace engineer who spent years building infrastructure at LeapYear Technologies and Rad AI, Diego now points AI at the least glamorous problem in medicine: the paperwork that decides whether a clinic gets paid. Sandy Health calculates expected reimbursement before a visit, tracks the actual payment after, and shrinks the gap in between. The company raised a $1.5M pre-seed round in November 2025.
Eesha Sharma
Eesha Sharma is the founder and CEO of Lamar Health, a Y Combinator-backed (W21) startup that uses AI to automate the mountain of paperwork standing between patients and high-cost specialty drugs. A genetics PhD from the University of Toronto and former Stanford postdoc, she traded antisense-oligonucleotide research for the unglamorous fight against prior-authorization bureaucracy after watching a family member endure years of misdiagnosis. Lamar Health now serves specialty pharmacies, infusion clinics and hospitals, automating prior auths, document review and EHR connectivity for medications that average roughly $70,000 a year per patient.
Syam Palakurthy
Syam Palakurthy is the co-founder and CEO of SamaCare, a San Francisco healthcare-technology company that rips paper and fax out of the specialty-drug prior authorization process. After a Dartmouth engineering-and-economics degree and a stint at Bain (where he once asked to be staffed on anything but healthcare), he built a cloud platform that now connects 15,000+ providers across retina, oncology, neurology, and rheumatology, and has raised roughly $35 million to make getting a patient on therapy 'as simple as a credit card swipe.'
Joy Liu
Joy Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Plenful, a San Francisco-based AI workflow automation platform modernizing healthcare operations. A Northwestern-trained economist who cut her teeth at Goldman Sachs and Barclays before moving into specialty pharmacy operations at Shields Health Solutions, Liu built Plenful from first-hand frustration with manual pharmacy workflows. Since emerging from stealth in 2023, she has grown the company to 60+ healthcare customers, achieved 4x year-over-year growth, and raised $76 million in total funding - including a $50 million Series B in 2025 co-led by Danaher co-founder Mitchell Rales. Named to Inc.'s 2026 Female Founders 500 list, Liu is on a mission to return time and focus to healthcare workers drowning in administrative burden.
Ogi Kavazovic
Ogi Kavazovic is the co-founder and CEO of House Rx, a San Francisco-based specialty pharmacy platform that enables clinical practices to dispense specialty medications directly to patients in-house. A serial operator who helped scale Opower (acquired by Oracle) and Flatiron Health (acquired by Roche), Ogi pivoted to fix a problem he kept seeing: patients leaving the doctor's office only to get lost in a broken specialty pharmacy system. House Rx has raised $100 million in total, including a $55 million Series B in November 2025, and now processes approximately $1.5 billion in specialty scripts annually across 80+ clinic sites.
Gauri Naik
Dr. Gauri Naik is a Ph.D. biotechnologist, serial entrepreneur, and Co-Founder & CEO of OptraHEALTH, a Silicon Valley AI health-tech company building conversational AI and revenue cycle automation tools for genetics, genomics, and clinical workflows. With 11 U.S. patents, a career spanning digital pathology (BioImagene, acquired by Roche), and products deployed at leading health systems across the US, Europe, and Asia, she sits at the intersection of molecular biology, machine learning, and enterprise health IT.
Will Yin
Will Yin is the co-founder and CEO of Mandolin, a San Francisco AI automation company building autonomous agents for specialty drug access. A Greenwich High School valedictorian and Stanford dropout, Yin previously co-founded Jupiter (YC-backed, $9M raised) before pivoting to healthcare. At Mandolin, he and co-founder Rohit Rustagi have raised $97M to automate the back-office workflows — prior auth, benefits verification, billing — that delay cancer and Alzheimer's patients from getting life-saving specialty therapies. Within months of launch, Mandolin deployed across 700+ clinics serving 250,000+ new patients annually.
Fawad Butt
Fawad Butt is the co-founder and CEO of Penguin AI, a Palo Alto-based healthcare AI platform company that raised $29.7M in Series A funding in September 2025. A former Chief Data Officer at Kaiser Permanente, UnitedHealthcare, and Optum, Butt spent years on the buyer side spending hundreds of millions on generic tech before deciding to build the solution healthcare actually needed. Penguin AI targets the $1 trillion annual administrative burden in US healthcare with purpose-built agentic AI, small language models, and digital workers that compress prior authorization reviews from 30 minutes to under two, positioning itself as 'the Epic of the healthcare back office.'