Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approvals for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a post-money valuation of $95 million led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investor Sequoia, which led Anterior's $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, the accelerator that helped launch the company in summer 2022, also participated in the Series A funding.
The round also included a number of angel investors, including Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, who was hired by Microsoft in March to lead Microsoft's consumer AI division. done.
NEA and Anterior did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Anterior, previously known as Co:helm, was co-founded by Abdel Mahmoud, a former doctor. After becoming frustrated with spending too much time on administrative tasks, he left medicine to pursue a master's degree in computer science and a career in technology. Rather than patience.
The company built LLM-based Copilot to help nurses and doctors save time collecting medical documentation required by insurance. Anterior's solutions aim to reduce rejection rates and accelerate patients' access to care.
Anterior's initial service is pre-authorization automation, but the company plans to eventually expand into other healthcare management functions.
Mohamad Makhzoumi, general partner of NEA Healthcare and co-CEO of the company, has joined Anterior's board of directors. Makhzoumi's investments include Tempus, a genomic testing and data analytics company founded by Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky. Tempus plans an IPO next week with a valuation of up to $6.1 billion. Makhzoimi also backed AI drug discovery startup Xaira, which launched this year with $1 billion in funding.
Anterior competes with Cohere Health, another pre-approval automation provider that raised $50 million in February, led by Deerfield Management with participation from Define Ventures, Flare Capital Partners, Longitude Capital and Polaris Partners, bringing the five-year-old company's total. It has $106 million in funding.
