Getting a new doctor approved to see patients and bill insurance often takes months — time that providers and patients don’t have.
On Wednesday, a New York City-based startup raised $19 million to help fix that problem. Assured Health, which uses AI agents to automate provider credentialing and insurance enrollment, closed its Series A round, bringing its fundraising total to $25 million. The round was led by Insight Partners, with continued participation from First Round Capital and Kindred Ventures.
Co-founders Rahul Shivkumar and Varun Krishnamurthy launched Assured in early 2024, but the idea traces back to their previous company, Dawn Health, a virtual platform for treating sleep disorders.
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As they hired therapists, nurses and doctors across multiple states, the founders ran into the same bottleneck over and over — the cumbersome process of verifying provider licenses and getting them approved to bill insurance. It’s a slow, state-by-state, payer-by-payer slog, with some payers requiring emailed applications and weekslong waits for a response, and others using online portals that have to be filled out and followed up on by phone every few weeks, Shivkumar explained.
Assured built AI agents that perform the work directly. The startup works with large group practices and health systems, offering three main services: credentialing new hires by verifying their licenses and background against primary sources, enrolling providers with payers so they can get paid, and monitoring state licenses to ensure they don’t lapse, Shivkumar stated.
“It’s about making it easier to go through some of these administrative workflows and make sure that your organization is actually getting paid out for the work that they do,” he declared.
The company’s platform is now used by more than 100 healthcare providers, including Houston Methodist and Tono Health.
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Much of Assured’s product roadmap has come directly from customer feedback, Shivkumar said. In the first quarter of next year, the startup plans to launch a new product focused on privileging, the labor-intensive process hospitals use to verify a new doctor’s references and confirm they’re qualified to perform procedures like surgery.
To Shivkumar, Assured’s competitors generally fall into two camps. At the health system level, the company competes with BPO firms that staff people, often offshore, to manually handle credentialing and enrollment. Among software vendors, Shivkumar named companies like Verifiable and Credential Stream as competitors, though he argued their products still require humans to do the underlying work while the software just tracks it.
“We’re building agents that can actually do the end-to-end workflows. Humans are mostly there to handle exception cases,” he remarked.
The new funding, he said, will go toward product and engineering research development, as well as expanding the company’s go-to-market team.
Photo: Weiquan Lin, Getty Images