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.

BioStack is building the data engine for healthcare and drug discovery AI. The bottleneck is not models. It is access to high-quality biological data. Clinical and experimental data is fragmented, unstructured, and locked inside hospitals, labs, and CROs, while generating new data is slow and expensive. BioStack fixes this with proprietary clinical and preclinical data pipelines that turn real biomedical workflows into ML-ready training environments. We structure longitudinal multimodal data across imaging, EHR, and experimental assays, then package it for post-training and reinforcement learning so models can learn how research and care actually happen. Instead of static datasets, BioStack gives AI labs workflow-aligned data and environments that improve reasoning, decision-making, and real-world performance in biology and medicine.

Clara is an AI primary care and longevity practice from the team that founded and grew Circle Medical to $100M in revenue. Our mission at Clara is to add one billion years of healthspan to humanity. We do this with an AI with deep clinical knowledge, coupled with the ability to sift through medical data to detect trends and patterns that could be missed. Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, Clara can see your medical data and then act. Chat with Clara as you would a doctor and Clara can help with you make sense of symptoms, get medication refills, order and understand labs, and achieve health goals. Medical recommendations are preliminary until one of our human medical providers in the loop reviews and approves them.

We know how to improve cancer outcomes by 8x-10x: you catch it early. MRI is the most robust and powerful cancer-detection tool in the world, yet systems cost millions to purchase, take months to install, and require high levels of technical skill to operate. We've redesigned MRI from the ground up with new physics, algorithms, and hardware, all to bring cancer screening to the entire world. Our mobile MRI is an imaging clinic on wheels. No equipment to buy, no infrastructure needed. For a flat per-scan fee, any medical site can offer MRI cancer screening. Starting with prostate cancer. Then everything else.

Harbor is a new, AI-enabled system of record for clinical trial data that replaces legacy electronic data capture (EDC) systems. Today, medical device and pharma companies spend months setting up custom EDCs that research sites then spend hours per subject per day entering data into. With Harbor, the EDC is spun up simply by reading your clinical trial protocol and research sites upload raw source documents into the platform, skipping the tedious and error-prone data entry process altogether. EDCs haven’t fundamentally changed since the 1990s. They are passive, regulatory compliant data bins that cause massive trial delays, coordinator burnout, and weeks of back-and-forth to resolve data errors. Because of this, data management currently consumes ~30% of total clinical trial budgets. With LLM and document extraction capabilities finally reaching the accuracy, reliability, and traceability required in high-risk domains, Harbor is redefining the way data is collected and monitored in clinical trials, all while remaining fully GCP- and 21 CFR Part 11 compliant. After months of building our initial product, our platform is now live with its first few clinical studies. For our largest customer and their 1600 subject randomized trial, we were able to use our internal tools to get their study database configured in just one week, which was ten times faster than legacy EDC vendors quoted. We built Harbor because we lived through this problem. Albert spent four years in clinical trials and regulatory strategy for a medical device startup, spending weeks at clinical sites watching coordinators battle legacy software firsthand. Nate brings the technical firepower, having built scalable software at Google and Ramp and as employee #1 at a previous YC startup.

Scheduling Wizard is building the logistics infrastructure to modernize healthcare operations. Hospitals still rely on manual workflows to manage staffing, patient flow, and core operations, contributing to $760B in annual inefficiency. 20 departments across 16 hospitals already outsource their physician scheduling to us, powered by our internal Scheduling Programming Language and AI-driven workflows. We work with Mass General, Johns Hopkins, UT Southwestern, UCSF, and many others. We are actively onboarding new clients and expanding into patient triaging and provider management systems, working with partner departments at UCSF and other leading institutions. Scheduling Wizard aims to bring healthcare operations into the future by reducing administrative burden and improving clinical care coordination. Our goal is to create the AI-native administrative layer in healthcare operations.

We automate the entire end-to-end prior-authorization process for private practices for cheaper, and more accurately than they're doing today.

Eos helps clinics turn their data into actionable insights to identify more eligible patients and early care interventions. We harmonize historical data across all systems to create standardized patient data distributions, acting like a translation layer between different applications. Then we build a centralized index over it: a compressed representation that lets petabytes of raw data stay where it is while allowing us to search and reason across it as one system. Instead of treating the visit or document as an isolated instance, we can look at it as a continuous story. We can predict how a case will resolve, trigger the required approvals and actions, and do so while reducing staff workload and recovering hospital revenue.

Mango Medical builds agentic surgical planning AI for orthopedic surgery. We deliver surgeon-ready plans in minutes instead of days. 8-figure LOI from a top orthopedic company. Pursuing FDA 510(k) clearance. We're building a future where every surgery follows a personalized plan.

Docura Health reduces settlement time in workers’ compensation cases by automating medical record review, chronologies, and report drafting with AI. We transform thousands of pages of records into structured, compliant summaries, helping evaluators, claim adjusters, insurers, and legal teams resolve cases faster.

CellType is building an agentic drug company. AI agents that run the full drug discovery pipeline on top of biological foundation models that simulate human biology. Our core technology, developed with Google DeepMind, has already discovered and validated a new cancer treatment signal. We’re working with Top 10 pharma.

Beacon Health (YC W26) is building AI employees that double revenue for primary care practices while also reducing the total cost of care. Primary care is the primary source of care for over 200M Americans, but physicians don’t have the bandwidth to manage their patient panels. Beacon Health builds AI employees that automate tedious background workflows - preventative screenings, prior authorizations, referrals, and risk adjustment. We handle these workflows from start to finish, directly in their EHR. 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. Our team is three PhD scientists from UCSF, UCSD, and UC Berkeley who have worked together for 3+ years in biotech. We have deep expertise in parasite biology, computational biology, and software for AI-based protein structure prediction

Creating the largest patient-derived cancer single-cell dataset for licensing to pharmaceutical and AI companies. These datasets are unique as they screen the effects of various drugs and genetic medicines under the control of our DNA switches.

Ruma Care automates all admin work for infusion clinics - starting with prior authorizations & copay assistance enrollment. 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. Current medical workflows aren't built for infusion clinics. Inventory, storage, transport, and billing is still managed through paper and excel spreadsheets. And because they’re so expensive, these specialty medications are denied by insurers at a rate of 37% each year. When they are denied, when workflows fail, or patients are infused before paperwork is cleared, 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 forms. 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 develops foundation models to generate missing bio-data about patients. With this imputed data, pharmaceutical companies can select better patients for their drug trials and shave months from their drug launch timelines. We’ve already trained a multimodal foundation model that integrates spatial biology modalities, beating SOTA at a fraction of the cost.

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.

Patientdesk is an AI bookings system that helps healthcare practices make more money. We do this by handling bookings, payments, and insurance to fill up a provider's calendar with high value appointments.

What if you could train a biological foundation model on... the entire internet? Exonic is pioneering a new generation of biological foundation models, focused on heterogeneous, unstructured, and noisy datasets. Our first application is the design of safer gene therapies. In 2025, we used AI to set a new state of the art in liver cancer targeted gene therapy, validated in vitro in our lab in San Francisco. So far in 2026, we have trained a new model with unprecedented zero-shot generalization on genomic regulatory expression in hold-out biosample datasets. More to be shared soon.

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.