Coral, a New York-based company, has raised $12.5 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed and Z47. The company aims to automate administrative workflows that slow down patient care in US speciality healthcare.
The administrative problems Coral is tackling cost the US healthcare system about $450 billion each year. Referrals often get stuck in fax queues, prior authorisations remain unresolved, and infusion patients sometimes miss doses due to paperwork delays. The main issue is outdated administrative processes that still rely on technology dating back to 1964.
Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty started Coral in 2024, inspired by their own experiences with healthcare delays. Its method focuses on understanding real operational needs before developing technology, which is the foundation of the company.
Coral’s main strategy is to automate processes that rely on fax machines rather than trying to replace them. The platform works with existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals, handling intake, prior authorisation, and patient communication without forcing providers to change how they work.
Coral’s technology can read handwritten fax forms, scanned insurance cards, and payer portal screens with 99.7% accuracy, much higher than the 52% accuracy of general-purpose RPA tools. This means complex patient intakes now take less than five minutes instead of 30.
Coral competes with older vendors like UiPath and Automation Anywhere, whose general-purpose systems are not built for the complexity of healthcare documents, as well as with new AI startups focused on healthcare. Coral stands out because of its high accuracy with important documents and its decision to work within existing systems. Many customers even pay the full contract value upfront, which is rare in enterprise software and especially unusual in a field known for long evaluation periods.
The new funding will help Coral hire more engineers and healthcare operations staff. The company recently launched AI voice and text tools for following up with payers and patients. Soon, Coral will release a workflow builder that lets providers set up their own processes without needing IT help, along with a tool that spots payers with high denial rates and shows where authorisations are delayed.
