Stitching Together Care Readiness: Our Seed and Series A Investment in Silna

American healthcare is a criss-crossed, hodgepodge mess of billing codes, mismatched incentives, and bureaucratic red tape that has cast a long shadow over the simple act of a doctor treating a patient. In the way of a seamless doctor visit are a number of factors like benefits verifications, eligibility checks, claim adjudications, and increasingly, prior authorizations. Prior authorizations, in a way, is how you might imagine the system should work if you were to to design it from the ground up. Before a treatment or procedure, the doctor would check with the insurance company to understand if they will cover it and for how much. In its idealized form, its a check-and-balance in the system that ensures medical necessity of treatments, provides price transparency, and importantly tries to avoid the nightmare scenario of a post-treatment claim denial.

Unfortunately the practical reality of prior authorizations is the introduction of friction — creating delays for patients and increased administrative burdens for providers. Those delays have real consequences, leading to worse health outcomes and unnecessary additional cost burden to the healthcare system. That’s why today prior auths are mostly reserved for particularly expensive use cases such as diagnostic imaging, rehabilitation services such as a physical therapy regimen, home health services, and more. But as payers are trying to keep costs in check, you can imagine a world where prior authorizations becomes more the norm, not the exception.

This is where Silna comes in. Named after the Urdu word meaning “sewn”, Silna is stitching together these disparate billing workflows, automating them with the latest LLM technology, into the first AI-powered Care Readiness Platform. Their mission is to streamline away all the administrative red tape that stands in the way of providers caring for their patients. Why start with prior authorizations? By handling everything upstream of care, we can meaningfully move the needle on “TTC” (time to care). This is an unambiguous good for the system and should improve health outcomes and remove costs from the system. There is an inherent tension between patients, providers, and payers, and we’ve found where you can create the rare “win, win, win”, the market tends to pull you forward—fast. That’s whats been happening at Silna. We now work with dozens of customers nationwide, alongside providers and clinics across physical therapy, autism care, senior living, and other verticals. Silna has helped over 50k patients get care, 2x’ing just in Q1 of this year alone, and maintains an NPS of 89, which is unheard of for this category.

Silna was founded by Jeff Morelli, Sagar Jajoo, and Pavel Asparouhov. Jeff was previously the first sales hire at Truework, and prior to that worked at Nightingale, an autism healthcare business. Sagar was the first product hire at Truework, and brings product and operational rigor that’s been critical to our early progress. And Pavel was an early engineer hire and rising star at Ramp, where he witnessed and helped shape the necessary ingredients for greatness that has driven them to the incredible success they’ve had. Joining them is a team of engineers and operators from companies such as Headway, Palantir, Square, and more. Silna has an “always on” culture with a strong bias to being in the office mirroring what we’re seeing with other leading AI companies who recognize the unique window of opportunity they’ve found. Silna is one of the first emerging AI native application businesses in NY and we expect them to attract high level talent that wants to participate in the value creation this technological shift is bringing.

For all of these reasons, we’re thrilled to announce today that Accel is co-leading Silna’s series A alongside our friends at Bain Capital Ventures, as well as notable operators such as the co-founders of Ramp, Opendoor, Speak, and Truework. This comes on the heels of Accel leading Silna’s seed round in August of 2023. Jeff has more to say about the round, and Axios covered the news here. Silna joins a growing list of AI-powered application workflow companies that we have partnered with, such as Decagon, Gamma, Speak, Quanta, Ironclad, and several more that are unannounced, as well as a growing healthcare portfolio for Accel. And in Silna, we see the same potential to radically transform their category on the back of this technological wave we’re all living through.