I'm excited to finally share that our company, Anterior (fka Co:Helm), is out of stealth and announcing a $3.2m seed round led by Sequoia, and a host of leading AI and Healthcare investors. This group includes leading engineers and founders at Deepmind & Inflection AI, senior executives at Google AI, unicorn founders in healthcare and scouts/angels at A16z, Kleiner Perkins, Atomico and Lightspeed. We’re excited to take yet another step in our mission to lift healthcare’s $950bn administration burden.
If US healthcare administration spend alone was modeled as GDP, it would rank higher than that of 195 other countries. Administration is not a bad word; it's a crucial component of care, but not at the current price. A key driver of this cost has always been expensive labor performing manual work. Across the US and globally, healthcare organizations suffer from using clinicians as "human interoperability glue" for broken systems that do not communicate with each other.
Healthcare’s digital revolution over the past decades has compounded the problem further. Between ‘09 and ‘18, chart notes doubled in length, with the average medical record now nearly as lengthy as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In fact, your doctor is spending more time with your Electronic Medical Record than with you.
The result? Clinicians today are not just quietly quitting - they’re burning out and fleeing. We don’t have enough clinicians joining to replace them either. By 2030, we’ll be short of 13 million nurses globally. As a former doctor, I experienced this for years. And I too exited the profession.
I had given up on healthcare, that is, until a year ago when my co-founder Zahid and I left our tech jobs to start Anterior (fka Co:Helm) with support from Neo’s accelerator. As a doctor, I both understood and cared deeply about the problem. Zahid brought expertise from a decade building AI applications in the real world and in highly regulated and complex enterprise environments. He’s also a repeat founder and serial builder.
We founded Anterior (fka Co:Helm) on the belief that recent advancements in natural language processing, building on an impressive decade of machine learning breakthroughs, have laid the foundation for building the next generation of assistive technologies. We saw an opportune moment to build “Co:Pilots”: AI systems that serve as an ‘extra pair of hands’ for every clinician. Abstracting away the mundane, bringing back the joy of care, and ultimately eliminating $570Bn in administrative waste.
We've chosen to start with Prior Authorizations (PA). PAs refer to the process of determining medical necessity for investigations and treatments. Today, hours are spent reviewing clinical data (mostly still sent by fax!) to make yes/no determinations. Today, our first Co:Pilot works alongside clinical teams whittling down hours of administrative work down to just minutes. These Co:Pilots enable our partners, who collectively cover nearly 3 million American lives, to accelerate their PA workflows and save $millions in overhead costs.
That’s our wedge. Our goal is to build for 100s of clinical workflows, beyond Prior Authorization. Anywhere cumbersome paperwork exists, we deliver delightful automation. Most importantly, we’re in the business of delivering time - time for patient care, the whole point of healthcare.
Although we're under a year old, the demand we're seeing is validating our thesis. With new funding, we’re seeking exceptional engineers, PMs, designers, and clinicians to join our mission. We need hackers to build it, and healers to guide it. Together we’ll eat administrative bloat for breakfast (we’ve got lunch in-office already covered).
I’m grateful to Sequoia and the stellar group of investors who now share this mission. Their partnership and wisdom have been invaluable as we scale Anterior (fka Co:Helm) into a category leader in healthcare.
I am immensely proud of what we have accomplished so far, and in particular, I am deeply grateful to our founding team members, whose work every day makes me feel like an imposter.
Finally, turning to you the reader, do you want to fix the hardest problem in healthcare today?
Are you looking for a low-ego, high-drive environment with plenty of steep learning curves?
99% need not apply. 1%? → Let’s talk.
CEO, Anterior (fka Co:Helm)