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  • Investments
  • 12 September 2024
  • 2 min read
  • Words: Northzone, Wendy Xiao, Nick Boesel

Our investment in Nirvana: Revolutionising Health Insurance Verification with AI

We are thrilled to announce our investment in Nirvana’s $24.2 million Series A funding round. We have led this round with participation from Inspired Capital, Eniac Ventures, and Surface Ventures. Founded by Akshay Venkitasubramanian, Urvish Parikh, and Kelvin Chan, Nirvana is using an AI-powered platform to bring price transparency to the healthcare market. The team has relevant experience across ML and healthcare. Akshay previously led teams that worked with self-insured employers to develop value-based care models at Mt. Sinai, and Kelvin and Urvish were senior product and engineering employees at Enigma, a sales and marketing business data platform. 

No other market makes customers guess the cost of essential services, only to get a surprise bill months later that could bankrupt them, forcing them to spend months disputing it over the phone. Nirvana’s technology eliminates the guesswork and allows patients to understand the true cost of care instantly, prior to treatment.

On the other side of the market, healthcare providers, incredibly undersupplied, are overworked and burnt out but they still have to spend $125bn a year out of their revenues (via the RCM process) to figure out how much they’re owed after rendering their services. 

It is one of the world’s worst data reconciliation problems between some of the most archaic systems in the world. It is also the problem that makes the healthcare market not an actual market. The sheer economic impact of getting this right before the service is rendered is massive, not to mention the potential effects of being able to do price comparisons between vendors – turning the healthcare market into an actual market.

Although initially created to solve this issue in behavioural health, Nirvana now covers multiple healthcare sectors, including physical therapy, intensive outpatient, and primary care. While incumbent’s technology is only able to provide 80% accuracy at best, Nirvana’s technology delivers 95%+ accuracy, is able to reduce denials by 20% and improve billing teams RCM efficiency by as much as 110%.

Our Partner Wendy Xiao, commenting on the deal shares: “When we met Akshay, Urvish, Kelvin, and the entire Nirvana team, we had already built a deep understanding of the RCM opportunity from our other healthtech investments and were actively looking for an AI investment in the space. However, they opened our eyes to the commercial shifts that were happening in the space with their deep customer knowledge. We feel the timing is perfect for Nirvana to build a category-defining company in the healthcare industry because providers are increasingly spending money to build an online experience to serve patients and reduce their own administrative burden. The Change healthcare hack also illustrated how antiquated and vulnerable the incumbents in this industry are, and it was around then that they all came calling.”