Coral raises USD $12.5 million to automate healthcare admin

Coral has raised USD $12.5 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed and Z47. The New York health technology startup uses software to automate administrative work for US specialty healthcare providers.

The funding will go toward product development and hiring, particularly in engineering and healthcare operations.

Founded by Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty, Coral is focused on a longstanding problem in the US healthcare system: administrative backlogs around referrals, prior authorisations, intake processing and patient communications. Its software works with existing electronic health record systems, fax lines and payer portals, rather than requiring providers to replace them.

That approach reflects the reality of many healthcare back offices, where fax machines and scanned documents remain central to daily operations. Coral says its system can process handwritten fax forms, scanned insurance cards, prior authorisation templates and payer portal screens as part of end-to-end workflow automation.

The startup says it has cut complete patient intake times from about 30 minutes to under five minutes. It also says its models have reached 99.7% accuracy on common healthcare administration document types, although an earlier summary of the announcement cited 98.7% accuracy, compared with 52% for general robotic process automation tools.

Growth push

Coral says it has reached multiple millions in revenue in less than a year and is targeting fourfold growth. It started with durable medical equipment providers, then expanded into infusion centres and specialty pharmacy, and is now moving into radiology and other specialist categories.

Some customers now use multiple parts of the system across their operations, while a portion are paying full contract values upfront. That is unusual in healthcare software, where procurement and evaluation periods are often long.

The broader pitch is built around pressure on specialist providers. Falling reimbursement rates and rising labour costs have left many clinics and service providers looking for ways to reduce administrative work without disrupting existing systems. Coral argues that delays in care are often caused less by treatment itself than by the paperwork and follow-up tasks around it.

For Shrihari, the issue became personal after he went through the US healthcare system following a minor accident. The experience of unanswered follow-up calls and slow-moving paperwork helped shape the idea behind the business.

"Every person in the healthcare system is being slowed down by the same thing: administrative work that was never built to scale. The coordinator chasing faxes. The patient waiting on a referral. The clinician buried in prior authorizations. When you automate the right things, all of them win at once. That is what Coral is building, and we are just getting started," said Ajay Shrihari, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Coral.

Investor view

Lightspeed and Z47 framed the investment as a bet on one of the hardest areas of healthcare technology, where fragmented systems and manual processes have slowed automation for years.

"Healthcare is one of the hardest environments to automate, given legacy systems and fragmented workflows, yet Coral is delivering real outcomes at scale. Their product is already being used by some of the largest customers in the U.S. to dramatically reduce patient intake times and first-pass denials. At Lightspeed, we've had the privilege of being part of Coral's journey since day one, and we're excited to continue supporting the team as they transform the healthcare industry," said Rohil Bagga, investor at Lightspeed.

"US healthcare admin carries over a trillion dollars in overhead each year, yet the back-office teams doing this work have been chronically underserved by technology. Our thesis is that the most compelling AI opportunities lie in workflow-heavy, tech-underserved categories that demand deep vertical expertise to crack. Ajay and Aniket are exceptionally customer-obsessed founders who embedded themselves with these teams, understood their pain at a granular level, and built a product their customers can't live without. The rapid growth and the caliber of customers they've won in a short time only reinforced our conviction. We're privileged to partner with them," said Ashwin KP, investor at Z47.

Product expansion

Beyond document and intake processing, Coral has recently introduced AI-based voice and text workflows for follow-ups with payers, patients and referral sources. It is also developing a workflow builder that would allow providers to configure administrative processes without relying on internal IT teams.

Another area of development is a data layer designed to show practice managers where cases are stalling, which payers have the highest denial rates, and which referral sources are most likely to convert into completed intakes. The goal is to give healthcare operators direct answers about where revenue and patient flow are being held up.

Across durable medical equipment, infusion and specialty pharmacy, Coral is arguing that healthcare administration is less a staffing problem than a workflow problem.