Healthcare Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Ginkgo Bioworks is the organism company. We design custom organisms for customers across multiple markets. We build our foundries to scale the process of organism engineering using software and hardware automation. Organism engineers at Ginkgo learn from nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.

Beacon Health (YC W26) is building AI agents for primary care - starting with value-based care. Primary care is the primary source of care for 200M Americans but physicians don’t have the bandwidth to manage their patient panels - preventative screenings, prior authorizations, referrals, and risk adjustment, all important work that steals time from patients. Our Al agents handle workflows for them directly in their EHR. We own them from end to end - putting their value based care on autopilot. We’re on a mission is to bring joy back to primary care.

Ditto Bio discovers drugs for autoimmune diseases by harnessing parasite biology. Viruses, ticks, and worms have experimented over millions of years to create proteins that control the human immune system. We use AI to identify these proteins and engineer them into next-generation autoimmune therapies.

Designing novel regulatory DNA (e.g., enhancers and promoters) to program precise therapeutic gene expression patterns - for diseases like cancer, CNS disorders and more. We're building the largest proprietary dataset of synthetic regulatory sequences across diverse cell-states.

Ruma Care automates prior authorizations - we’re starting with clinics that administer the most expensive specialty medications. Biologics are expensive medications that cost $80-$150K+ per year per patient, and often need to be administered in specific settings called infusion clinics. Medical providers buy these drugs up front to secure pricing deals and safer inventory - they are reimbursed for the cost of the medications through the patients’ insurance. Because they’re so expensive, these specialty medications are denied by insurers at a rate of 37% each year. When they are denied, providers don’t get reimbursed for the medication and are left covering the costs. Ruma Care solves this so clinics get paid, patients get treated faster, and care teams spend less time fighting insurance. We do this in three ways: 1. For each medication, diagnosis, and insurance combination, Ruma extracts the submission criteria required to get the drug approved by insurers. 2. We pull out the correct forms, then automate the form-filling for prior authorizations. 3. Lastly, we enroll patients in copay assistance programs, all in one workflow and platform. We turn a process that traditionally spans 70+ online portals, disparate paper forms, and manual phone calling into a single, streamlined platform. As we process prior authorizations, our models learn from denial patterns to understand exactly what insurers need to see to get a prior authorization approved.

Strand AI builds foundation models that predict missing biological data from measured readouts.

Ritivel is an AI-native workspace for regulatory and medical writing teams at life sciences companies. Our AI agents draft CTDs, CSRs, INDs, and BLAs in minutes instead of weeks, helping drugs reach patients faster. Every month a drug is delayed from reaching the market costs pharma companies ~$45M in lost revenue and more importantly, delays treatment for thousands of patients who need it. Yet regulatory teams are stuck in a painful, months-long process: synthesizing thousands of pages of clinical data, hunting through SharePoint folders for the right documents, chasing colleagues for missing inputs, and manually drafting submissions. Ritivel deploys AI agents that transform how regulatory teams work. Our agents generate comprehensive first drafts directly in Microsoft Word, following FDA formatting requirements and pulling from your existing clinical data and prior submissions. Every data point includes citations linked back to the original source, so reviewers can verify with one click. Connected to SharePoint and Veeva, our agents automatically source the right documents. Integrated with Outlook, they handle reminder emails and follow-ups automatically. We're engineers who previously built AI copilots at Microsoft Research. After 50+ conversations with pharma professionals, we discovered the critical bottleneck in regulatory submissions and built Ritivel to solve it.

Opalite makes it easy for healthcare providers to communicate with non-English speaking patients. We’re built to work inside existing clinical workflows, so providers can communicate in real time without waiting for an interpreter or delaying care. Opalite is available instantly, 24/7, and replaces traditional interpretation services with software that’s more reliable and saves millions of dollars per year. We've built a voice AI system that is the safest, most compliant, and most accurate medical interpreter in the world.

Prana replaces the reactive, 15-minute annual physical with continuous, proactive care. We connect to your medical records and wearables to watch for "clinical drift," catching subtle declines in health that human doctors miss between visits. Most AI health apps are just chatbots. Prana is a full-stack medical provider. Our AI acts as a always-on physician that watches your data, explains your labs, and manages your prescriptions. Safety & Scale: We automate 90% of the "grunt work" (history taking, logistics, triage) so our human doctors can focus purely on high-leverage decisions. This allows us to offer 24/7 physician care for a fraction of the cost of traditional care. The Team: - Meer Patel (CEO): JHU BME. Deferred Brown Medical School to build Prana because code scales better than appointments. - Vishvam Rawal (CTO): Ex-Quant. Building high-frequency data infrastructure for health signals. - Sanjit Menon (CHO): Graduating MD Candidate. Deep clinical expertise to ensure our models practice good medicine. Traction: Live in beta with early users.

The universal AI front desk for healthcare: plugs into any practice management system (cloud-based or on-premise) and automates all patient workflows: scheduling, cancellations, payment plans, insurance checks, reminders, intake, and follow-ups.

Exonic is building a global network of intelligence to cure disease. We are the first drug discovery company open to everyone. Today drug discovery is siloed - secretive, adversarial institutions in glass towers. Biological AI is changing the rules. Every day drug discovery becomes more of a computational problem. Exonic is turning drug discovery into an open, meritocratic tournament. We are advised by world leaders in bio AI, including the former Head of AI at Ginkgo Bioworks, and the first author of Evo (cover of Science). All of the best biological AI models are open source. And on Exonic, you can combine them, prompt them, and share your innovative workflows without writing a single line of code. Using Exonic Studio, we just beat a state-of-the-art benchmark in liver cancer (HepG2) synthetic enhancer design, validated in our wet lab. The platform just went live - you can start right now. We are turning the internet into a drug discovery powerhouse.

Saffron Health is building AI agents that automate specialist referrals for primary care. Primary care staff spend hours each day on tedious coordination work: searching for in-network specialists, filling out authorization forms, and chasing down medical records. Saffron's agents find available in-network providers, complete prior authorizations, and help patients book appointments, which lowers administrative costs and improves access to care.

Anto is building a foundation model for microbial communities, making the gut microbiome computable for the first time. We predict drug toxicity and efficacy across diverse populations and fix drugs so they work for everyone — solving the hidden root cause of most drug failures. Founded by Arvid (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Nature-published researcher who pioneered quality-aware, goal-directed sparsification) and David (Harvard Medical School Gastroenterology, J&J), second-time founders who published the breakthrough at leading machine learning AI conferences and Nature.

Overdrive Health offers AI powered medical billing services, helping providers get paid more money in less time. Our technology enables us to provide the best quality insurance and patient billing services for a fraction of the usual cost

Kaigo Health provides an AI-powered outpatient care management platform that automates and scales remote care management for Medicare patients including post-discharge followups, ongoing check-ins, and monitoring. Using phone calls as an age-friendly interface, we aggregate patient responses, voice biomarkers, and remote patient monitoring data for powerful preventative and proactive healthcare.

Norra helps nursing facilities manage equipment operations. Every year, ~$80 billion are spent on medical equipment like beds, concentrators, and wheelchairs. Nursing facilities continue to operate with zero visibility which leads to $15 billion in equipment waste annually. We use physical trackers and AI agents to eliminate this.

We deliver high-quality, cost-effective healthcare to employees through text. Employers cut 10–20% of healthcare spend. Employees get concierge care that improves outcomes. Our AI agents analyze clinical data to identify care needs. We treat common conditions through our integrated virtual clinic. For more complex care, our agents find the best in-network providers using millions of price and quality data points, and handle end-to-end appointment booking.

We help oncologists and radiologists extract insights from CT scans to support tumor characterization and treatment. The hospitals we work with include Stanford Hospital, Cedars-Sinai, UCI Health, and Weill Cornell.

Nori is a concierge-level AI health coach in your pocket. It takes all of your health data—Apple Health, medical records, wearables, everything—and boils it down into a personalized daily plan. Users love it: “It's truly one of the best apps and I check it first every day. Since using Nori, I've been limiting devices in bed and eating earlier—and I'll be damned if it's not working... I started getting more deep sleep, my resting HR dropped to 43, my recovery improved.”—Jen, Nori user"

Play Health is building a perimenopause care platform to provide women and their providers with the tools they need to relieve symptoms fast. It is led by technical, second-time, YC-backed founders Andrea Mazzocchi, PhD and Ian Miller, with an exit and a unicorn between them. Over 30 million women in the U.S. are experiencing perimenopause symptoms, spending an estimated $15B+ annually on symptom management. Despite this most only receive generic solutions and struggle to find effective symptom relief. We're bringing evidence-based perimenopause care to women through partnerships with medical practices and employer and health benefits programs. Our platform integrates personalized symptom, medication, and lifestyle data to generate AI-powered insights and clinical protocols, enabling providers to deliver specialized care. Every clinical interaction enriches our longitudinal dataset allowing us to create better outcomes for patients, deeper insights for providers, and expand into women’s health broadly. This also enables us to partner with pharma and biotech companies developing therapeutics and diagnostics for women's health.

LunaBill is building AI Voice callers for healthcare billing teams. Insurance claim follow-up calls account for the 80% of the daily workload of a healthcare billing team, with each call averaging 30 minutes. Since our launch in July we are now at $764K in contracted ARR, of which $428K is live revenue and the rest will go live by January 2026. Our customers see a 10x increase in claims followed up per biller in the first week and we have converted 100% of pilots to paying customers. We have automated 50,000+ calls and signed partnerships with top healthcare leaders like UC health systems, Mayo, Experian Health and more. The founders have known each other for over a year. Suhail is a 2x founder, with 3+ years of experience building in healthcare including operating a medical billing company with 200+ healthcare clients. David founded Skiesoft, Taiwan’s biggest healthcare AI scribe company, used by 120k+ healthcare professionals. He also worked as a data scientist at UCSF, building models to audit medical-coding accuracy. Yash was a researcher at various hospital systems including Mayo Clinic.

Algen is using CRISPR to uncover disease-driving RNA messages to find treatments for cancer, inflammation and diseases with high unmet needs. We are harnessing the power of CRISPR and machine learning to find first-in-class drugs that modulate RNA messages at single-cell resolution. Algen's founders are bioengineer from Jennifer Doudna Lab and biotech commercialization expert, teamed up with experienced pharmaceutical executives.

Streamline prescription refills, reduce workload, and enhance patient care with intelligent automation.

When enterprise agents fail in production, the conditions that caused the failure are critical: user state, data, tool calls, and context. Without a way to recreate these conditions, teams can't fix what broke. Playgent provides infrastructure to create high-fidelity sandbox environments for AI agents. Our environments come packaged as a single MCP url where tool calls are mocked, authentication is abstracted away, and test data can be initialized via natural language or JSON specifications. Teams can use Playgent to reproduce production failures in safe, scoped environments that accurately reconstruct state. Finally, export runs as OTel traces from Playgent's environment to plug directly into your observability tools or RL pipelines.

Blank Bio builds foundation models that understand RNA, the language of life. Our model powers applications across the entire R&D pipeline, from designing better drugs to running smarter clinical trials. Our first model is state-of-the-art in mRNA property prediction. It simulates costly experiments, helping partners design more effective mRNA medicines faster and cheaper. Our open-source models are being used by Sanofi & GSK. We’re also collaborating with the Arc Institute to bring our RNA embeddings into the next generation of virtual cell models. mRNA design is just the beginning. As the model improves, we’re extending to applications like target ID, novel biomarker discovery, patient stratification, and more. We’ve spent decades applying machine learning to biology across academia (PhDs at the University of Toronto) and industry (Recursion, Deep Genomics, Amazon). Contact us to learn more: founders@blank.bio

The Operating System for Health AI: we deploy, govern, and scale AI agents across healthcare organizations.

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐰𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬: I (Angel) have had three knee surgeries since my mid-teens and was billed more than $250K for care that should have cost a fraction of that. Fighting those inflated charges was so painful that we set out to build a consumer-facing AI agent to do it for others. In less than five months, we helped sixty patients erase or reduce over $300K from their medical bills. This inspired us to fix the problem farther upstream: stopping bad payments before the patient ever sees a bill. So we launched payment integrity, machine-learning models that audit every medical claim for self-insured employers and health plans in real time. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦: • Self-insured employers waste $60 B+ each year on claims that never should have been paid. Healthcare is the 2nd largest company expense after payroll. • Manual audits are slow and partial: Reviewers focus only on high-dollar claims, letting millions more slip through unnoticed. • Existing audit software is static: Decades-old rule engines can’t keep pace with evolving codes, contracts, or billing tactics. • Incentives are misaligned: Third-party administrators are paid to process claims, not to police them, so accuracy checks are minimal. 𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Our models audit medical claims before and after payments have been issued. We catch nuanced billing, coding, and contract errors to save 3-7% on annual claims spend. We work with self-insured employers and health plans. 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐔𝐬: Angel Onuoha (CEO) and Ahmad Shehu (CTO) have worked together for 4 years. Before Avelis Health they built Zuvy, a Lagos-based fintech company that provided invoice factoring to small businesses. Zuvy was acquired by The BAS Group in 2025.

Locata is an AI referral management platform for Primary Care. We deploy AI agents to automate every step of the referral process that back-office staff face daily, from submitting prior authorizations to broadcasting updates and following up with patients. This frees up staff to focus on patient care. Primary care back-offices are severely understaffed and overburdened by administrative work associated with referrals. Additionally, patients suffer navigating the complex referral process, which can have disastrous health effects if they don’t get the care they need. These factors point to a glaring gap in the system—where out of over 100 million specialist referrals issued annually in the US, only half are actually completed. Locata is tackling this problem head-on, saving administrative staff hours each week and ensuring that the referral process goes as smoothly as possible for patients and their providers. Alejandro and Josh met at Stanford where they graduated with BS degrees in Computer Science. Alejandro was a senior software engineer at Meta’s Reality Labs where he led development of several AI features for wearable products and prior to that conducted AI research at Stanford Medicine. Josh graduated with a masters in Computer Science, specializing in AI, before working as a software engineer at Google where he developed AI products that served over 1 billion users. Within two weeks of building our product, we signed a major regional health center and have saved them over 100 hours of work in our first month live.

Novaflow is the AI data analyst for biology labs. -- Bioinformatics data analysis is a time-consuming and expensive process for scientists. With Novaflow, life scientists can upload experimental data, ask questions in plain English, and get instant, publication-ready plots, giving them results in minutes instead of months. Researchers at leading institutions like UCSF, Mount Sinai, UC Berkeley, and Harvard are already using Novaflow in their labs.

b12 is an AI copilot that plans how to create and test new molecules for chemists. We're like a GPS for chemistry, helping pharma companies plan the recipes for new drugs, accelerating early-stage drug discovery from years to months. Andres built the first AI agent that can autonomously think and make molecules in a robotic lab, published in Nature Machine Intelligence (750+ citations), and won the best paper award at the NeurIPS AI for Science conference. Zlatko is a 3x National Chemistry Olympiad champion, competed at IChO level, and medicinal chemist who has worked at Roche and leading lab robotics companies. He has an extensive network of hundreds of chemists across Europe. We are publishing a groundbreaking paper in Nature demonstrating our AI's ability to optimally plan chemical recipes. We run paid pilots with big pharma companies showing that our platform planned a set of experiments that achieved full conversion in a single attempt, eliminating the usual 8-12 iteration cycle.

Parachute helps hospitals adopt AI safely and at scale. We vet AI tools that fill clinical gaps, run state-of-the-art evaluations, monitor every model for drift and compliance, and lock every decision in an immutable audit trail.

An AI-maximalist pharma platform. We use agents to buy drugs, run clinical trials, and sell for a profit. 10x faster and 20x leaner than incumbents. Sourcing Agent: Mines public/private databases and unstructured global data to surface overlooked preclinical candidates. Scientific Agent: Runs comp bio models (ESM-3, RFdiffusion, Boltz-2, AlphaFold) to assess safety and efficacy in silico. Commercial Agent: Analyzes FDA incentives, pricing dynamics, TAM, competitive landscape, and payer alignment. Clinical Agent: Runs digital twin simulations, evaluates CRO/CMC risk, and builds trial plans to Phase 1. PoS Agent: Evaluates the most critical factors that impact the likelihood of clinical trial success. Built by 2 Stanford CS students who have built 3 startups together before.

Phases uses AI to automate clinical trial operations, starting with patient recruitment. Our agent scans medical records and conducts human-like voice interviews to assess patient eligibility for clinical trials. Our vision is to run the entire clinical trial back-office with agents, getting drugs to market at a fraction of the time and cost it takes today.

America is facing an addiction and mental health crisis. We're building a suite of AI agents to automate away the tasks that occupy half of the time and resources of behavioral health clinics—documentation, compliance, audits, and more. We save time, money, and mental bandwidth so that clinicians can stop chasing insurance reimbursements and go back to saving lives.

CareSwift is a real-time AI assistant built directly into ambulance reporting systems, guiding medics as they document care and instantly flagging errors. Crews complete accurate, compliant reports in under three minutes, cutting documentation time by 80 percent and helping agencies avoid insurance claim denials. Ambulance crews lose valuable time completing reports after each call. Even minor mistakes cause insurance claims to be rejected.

Trapeze empowers doctors to answer patient calls 24/7 with our voice agents clones of their best call center reps and receptionists. In the past 3 months, we’ve onboarded 140+ doctors nationwide serving 1,000,000+ patients. We're building the AI-native Zocdoc to create the standard for how patients and providers find each other. Follow along on the BTS of our journey: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTjQyxEQx/

Manufacturing pharmaceutical drugs faster and in the USA

Galen is an AI-powered personal healthcare companion. We enable patients to securely connect their medical records from over 800 healthcare institutions across more than 12,000 locations in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. We also connect with over 20 popular wearable devices including Apple Watch, Fitbit, and Dexcom, bringing all your medical records and health data into one unified space. We founded Galen because for over four years, Viraj struggled to navigate several conditions related to chronic low back pain. He often found himself waiting weeks for responses from his care team, received little guidance or education about new diagnoses, and was overwhelmed trying to manage overlapping conditions and medications. His experiences are not unique. Our healthcare system is overloaded and fragmented, and often, patients are left to navigate their care on their own. Everyday there are nearly 1 billion health-related Google searches, but the responses to such queries are generic and impersonalized, because the searches lack any insight into a users personal health background. By leveraging your own data and state-of-the art LLM memory capabilities, Galen delivers personalized insights, proactive health recommendations, and 24/7 on-demand medical support — empowering patients to be an active part of their health team. We are a consumer app in beta testing and will be available on the App Store soon!

Novoflow is building AI employees that automate medical operations for clinics. Novoflow built the universal bridge into EHR systems—so every workflow, from scheduling to billing, can finally run on AI. The first product is an AI employee that talks to patients and uses computer agents to book, reschedule, and recover cancelled appointments. Built for healthcare providers and hospitals.

Aegis is the all-in-one platform that helps healthcare providers recover lost revenue by automating insurance denial appeals—from intake to resolution. Built for billing teams, healthcare providers and hospitals.

Post-acute care loses billions to broken revenue infrastructure. Claim Health prevents it. We catch denials before they happen, automate the work drowning ops teams, and connect every step from referral to cash so agencies can scale without adding headcount. Kevin and JJ bring nearly a decade of experience building and scaling healthtech companies across different segments. Post-acute care is a $400B market with over $20B in annual revenue leakage due to broken revenue infrastructure. Claim Health is fixing that.

Adentris is an AI compliance copilot for hospitals and clinics. We are like Grammarly for doctors, finding and fixing mistakes that lead to denied insurance claims or patient lawsuits. The industry today spends $40B doing this manually.

Think Function Health for Europe. We combine medical expertise and AI to transform regular blood testing into actionable insights to help people live healthier, longer.

Today, it takes months to understand how drugs perform in the real world, delaying safety insights, slowing approvals, and costing lives. Frekil turns that months-long process into minutes, with full auditability and regulatory-grade rigor. Frekil automatically generates real-world evidence of drug performance from EHR and claims data. It acts like an AI Biostatistician that understands medical ontologies and statistical methods, running complex analyses on autopilot. We help Pharma, Biotech, CROs, and Clinical Researchers to run RWE studies 100x faster and produce publication-ready retrospective studies and FDA/EMA-ready evidence packages with transparent lineage in minutes.

The intelligence layer behind modern life sciences engagement, enabling compliant, continuous conversations across HCPs, patients, and field teams

Our app allows doctors to speak any language, eliminating the need for human medical translators in hospitals and clinics. Despite spending billions on in-person and remote translators—mostly through outdated call centers—hospitals still fail to provide adequate care for non-English-speaking patients. We're building the most accurate and compliant medical language translation system across voice and video modalities.

Our founder Noah, an experienced tech entrepreneur, was directly impacted by a severe genetic disease when his daughter was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome, a disease that afflicts 1 in 10,000 girls. Using an innovative polytherapy strategy, we’ve successfully improved her quality of life, and have designed new therapeutics that each could be worth billions and together could deliver a cure.

Paratus Health is the AI operations layer for outpatient clinics. We build autonomous agents that don’t just assist staff - they replace them, fully handling front desk calls, patient intake, insurance verification, documentation, and billing prep. Everything is deeply integrated into EHRs like Epic and Athena, eliminating the need for fragmented tools and manual work. No toggling between systems. No busywork. Just one intelligent system running your clinical operations - faster, smarter, and more profitably than ever before.

Harbera helps clinic keep their doctors credentialed and compliant. Our AI software continuously monitors and proactively helps admin teams re-credential doctors, preventing denied claims, disruptions in patient care, and lost revenue caused by doctors falling out-of-network.

Amby Health automates billing and quality reviews for ambulance agencies (EMS), replacing large back-office teams with AI. We analyze patient reports in seconds—not months—accurately coding claims and identifying liability and care risks while eliminating costly, error-prone manual processes.