Assort Health picked up $120 million in series C funding, hitting unicorn status, to fuel the company's work building out a voice AI agent platform for healthcare.
Menlo Ventures led the round, and the series C also was backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis, First Round Capital, Chemistry, Joe Montana, Tau Ventures and Quiet Capital.Â
The startup builds specialty-specific AI voice agents to support practices, from orthopedics to cardiology to immunology, by automating doctor appointments and streamlining patient care. The company has expanded beyond scheduling to span intake forms, referrals, document processing, medication refills, real time eligibility, lab requests and payments.Â
The voice AI startup market is experiencing explosive growth with a surge of venture capital investment. Assort Health is seeing rapid growth, with revenue jumping 20x in 15 months, said Jon Wang, founder and co-CEO. He asserts one of the company's key differentiators is its large proprietary specialty dataset built on 190 million patient interactions, 62,000 care protocols and 1.6 million decision pathways.
The company developed Synapse, a proprietary AI model, that learns the patterns of specialty workflows across every deployment, then generates the edge cases, tests and simulations each one has to handle, according to executives.
"The first phase of our business was all about understanding how complex and nuanced just simply automating patient access was," Wang told Fierce Healthcare. "It really hard to get it right. It took us six months to implement our AI agent. We built Synapse, which is our AI agent that gets better with every interaction. It now has 190 million patient interactions powering it, and so what used to take months it now down to weeks. It has unlocked real scale deployment for this product doing the highest automation rates in the lowest amount of time on the most complex workflows."
The company's thesis is that owning the front door of healthcare unlocks the entire patient journey. "We have all the patient communications data as well as all the business protocols that took us painstakingly many, many months to build into our engines," Wang noted.
Assort Health is now focused on its second phase to build out a voice AI platform for healthcare that provides patients a concierge, personalized experience, executives said. "Our big push is moving towards healthcare that remembers," Wang noted. "It's basically moving from a reactive healthcare system where you feel that you're invisible and you're constantly retelling your story over and over again to every single provider to a system that remembers."
To make that happen, Assort Health has developed voice AI agents that can handle the entire patient journey—inbound calls, triage, lab requests, med refills, scheduling, insurance eligibility and intake in any language. Agents also reach out to patients proactively to close referral loops, automatically act on detected care gaps, such as mammograms, colonoscopies and vaccines, recover no-shows and resolve payments.
Assort Health's platform also runs the operational work behind each visit and writes every detail back to the electronic health record, including referrals, document processing, patient intake and personalized pre-post visit forms, according to the company. And the company's technology quips staff with an AI copilot to manage complex patient access needs in real time.
AI agents connect all of this in what the company calls a "patient journey memory" carrying context across every touchpoint for a continuous record for each patient. Every interaction a patient has with a medical practice builds on the last, across channels and across every step of their care journey, executives said. Language preference, visit history, tone, open tasks and sentiment all carry through automatically, according to Wang.
The aim is to create a patient experience that feels personal and continuous,
not transactional.
"We're going to invest over $70 million into our R&D to execute on this," Jeffery Liu, founder and co-CEO, told Fierce Healthcare. Prior to Assort Health, Liu was a software engineer at Facebook and Athelas.Â
Assort Health's platform enables providers to book more appointments, accelerate payment collection and close critical care gaps without adding to front office staff workload. Customers can see a 5% lift in appointment volume and a 115% increase in labor capacity, according to the company.
MDCS Dermatology, a multi-location dermatology practice operating across New York and New Jersey, has been using Assort Health's AI solution for two years, starting with inbound AI agents for scheduling and triaging patient calls and expanding to outbound AI agents.
"For a dermatology practice, patient experience is everything, practice reputation is everything. This is really our front door. We really wanted to pick a tool where it's quality, quality, quality," Parinita Amin, M.D., CEO of MDCS Dermatology, told Fierce Healthcare. "We also wanted to work with a vendor that was really a full platform. I think one of the challenges for healthcare operators is the sprawl that's occurring with a lot of AI applications out there. Everyone does a little bit of something, but what practices really need is a one-stop shop and a platform that will continue to innovate."
MDCS Dermatology operates 9 locations and the practice sees over 130,000 to 138,000 patient visits annually.
Amin said the practice evaluated every AI solution on the market. "Assort was the only true platform. It runs the full patient journey as one connected system, from referrals and document processing to intake, care gap closure, real-time eligibility, and payments," she said. "The difference is memory. Everyone else automates one piece and forgets the rest. Assort remembers every patient across every interaction and connects it all into one conversation. Our automation rate climbs every quarter as they execute against an ambitious roadmap, and the gap between Assort and everyone else keeps widening."
The dermatology practice integrated Assort Health's AI agent as a member of the team, Amin said, and it offers a unified, intelligent platform that enables the practice's different workflows to "talk to each other," she noted. It adds up to a better experience for patients and more appointments for the practice.
"We have a 4.9 star rating across 30,000 reviews on multiple platforms and that's held steady. Our appointment bookings are actually up by 20% so we've been able to grow the practice and add providers," Amin said.
A mishandled interaction doesn't just create operational problems, it can mean losing a new patient altogether, according to Jon Shaker, executive director of the Boston Bone and Joint Institute. "That's why we wanted a partner with a proven track record of handling specialty care complexity at scale. Assort's experience across hundreds of deployments gave us confidence they could deliver from day one, and they've helped us ensure patients move through the right care journey from their very first interaction."
Assort is expanding rapidly into health system operations, working with health systems ranging from large community-based organizations to academic medical centers. Several health systems, such as John Muir Health, are partnering with Assort to support increasingly complex ambulatory operations.
In healthcare, the race is on for AI agents. A growing list of startups and scaled health tech companies see opportunities to apply AI to patient communications and back-end administrative work. Health tech company Artera secured $65 million in December to fuel further expansion and build out AI agents for patient communications. UnityAI is developing agentic AI solutions to automate operational and administrative workloads in outpatient and clinical settings.
EliseAI, a company using AI to tackle administrative tasks, picked up $250 million in series E funding in August. Startup Hello Patient built Gen AI-based agents to handle patient communications for medical practices. Tennr, a company that uses AI to automate messy, document-heavy administrative workflows, raised $101 million last June. This week, Prosper AI banked $30 million to scale its agentic AI platform to power administrative tasks from patient scheduling to insurance verification and patient billing.
Liu asserts that the company's proprietary data, experience implementing its platform with specialty groups and internal tech teams give it a competitive moat in the market. Demos of AI solutions are no longer hard to build, he noted.
"What's defensible is really what's hard to get, and we believe what's hard to get is data. We have the most data, the most implementations under our belt. We have proprietary data that Anthropic and OpenAI don't have and these smaller companies don't have," Liu said.
Wang expects the market to consolidate. "Provider groups know it, and the smart ones aren't buying another point solution. They want one partner with the capital and the engineering depth to transform how they operate over the long run. That's what we built. Our engineers learn across hundreds of customers and build every implementation for the specific practice in front of them," he said.