New York-based Coral raised $12.5 mn in a funding round led by Lightspeed and Z47. Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty founded the company to address a stubborn problem in US healthcare: administrative work slows patients long before clinical capacity runs out.
Coral has reached multi-mn revenue in under a year, cut full patient intake to under five minutes, and won infusion and specialty pharmacy customers willing to pay full contracts upfront. Its next target is 4x growth before year-end.
In American healthcare, patients often wait because referrals sit in fax queues, prior authorizations remain unresolved, or discharge paperwork lags behind care. The constraint isn’t always doctors. It’s the staff burden tied to every appointment, claim, referral, and follow-up.
For Shrihari, the issue turned personal after a minor accident pushed him through the US healthcare system as a patient for the first time. Calls went unanswered for days, forms outlasted the injury, and the friction sat everywhere outside the exam room. Coral grew from that experience.
The company’s early bet sounds unfashionable, but practical. Don’t replace the fax machine. Work around it.
Coral connects to existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals, then automates administrative workflows for specialty providers. Its customers include durable medical equipment suppliers, infusion centers, radiology practices, and specialty pharmacy operators.
The platform handles intake, prior authorization, fax processing, and patient communications without asking providers to rebuild how they work.
Coral says its models have reached 99.7% accuracy across healthcare back-office document types, including handwritten fax forms, scanned insurance cards, prior authorization templates, and payer portal screens.
Full patient intakes, even the more complex cases, now run in under five minutes. When information is missing, as it often is, Coral works across the relevant parties to collect it and move the patient case forward.
Ajay Shrihari, founder and CEO of Coral, said every part of healthcare slows under administrative work never designed for scale.
Clinicians get buried in prior authorizations. According to Shrihari, automating the right workflows helps all of them at once.
Coral first targeted durable medical equipment providers, one of the most fax-heavy areas in outpatient care. The company then found the same pattern across other specialties. The bottleneck wasn’t specific to DME. It was a healthcare operations problem.
In infusion care, a delay doesn’t feel like paperwork. It means a missed dose. Coral has deployed its platform across infusion centers, taking on authorization and intake workflows that previously pulled clinical staff away from patients for hours.
Customer behavior now gives Coral one of its strongest signals. More customers are running several modules across their operations, and some pay the full contract value upfront. That isn’t typical in enterprise software. It’s even rarer in healthcare, where vendor reviews often drag on.
When a complex workflow finishes in under five minutes with high accuracy, the return shows up fast. So does the commitment.
Coral has reached multi-mn revenue and aims to grow 4x before the end of 2026. The company plans deeper expansion across current verticals, plus a move into radiology and more specialty categories.
Rohil Bagga, investor at Lightspeed, said healthcare remains one of the toughest environments to automate because legacy systems and fragmented workflows slow change. He said Coral already serves some of the largest US customers and has reduced patient intake times and first-pass denials. Lightspeed has backed Coral since day one.
Ashwin KP, investor at Z47, said US healthcare administration carries more than $1tn in annual overhead, yet back-office teams have received poor technology support for years.
According to Z47, the strongest AI opportunities sit in workflow-heavy, tech-underserved categories where deep vertical expertise matters. He said Shrihari and Mohanty spent time with these teams, understood their operational pain, and built a product customers rely on. Fast growth and customer quality strengthened Z47’s view.
Coral will use the funding for hiring and product development. The company is adding engineers and healthcare operations specialists, putting software builders beside people who have spent years inside provider workflows.
On the product side, Coral recently shipped AI-powered voice and text workflows. These automate follow-ups with payers, patients, and referral sources, replacing calls that once required staff time.
The next phase goes further. Coral is building an AI workflow builder for providers, giving operations teams a way to design and deploy their own administrative workflows without opening an IT ticket. The aim is to fit Coral around how providers already run, not force providers into a new operating model.
Coral is also developing a business co-pilot layer from the data it already processes. Practice managers would see which payers produce the highest denial rates, why rejections happen, where authorization cases stall, and which referral sources convert into completed intakes.
They would also see where insurance claim rejections block revenue and what changes might improve resubmission outcomes.
According to Beinsure analysts, this type of workflow intelligence matters because back-office automation loses value when it only moves forms faster. Providers need operational answers. Which payer slows the queue. Which missing field causes the denial. Which referral source wastes staff time.
The US healthcare system won’t simplify itself. Coral’s thesis is direct: administration is a workflow problem, not a staffing problem.
Across DME, infusion, and specialty pharmacy, the company says the answer is gaining traction. Fax queues shrink. Staff spend more time with patients.
Coral is a healthcare automation platform built for specialty providers. By combining intelligent document processing, agentic workflows, and voice automation, Coral integrates with existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals to automate administrative workflows from patient intake and prior authorization to billing, compliance, and patient outreach. Coral reduces human error, accelerates care delivery, and frees up healthcare staff to focus on the work that requires judgment and empathy.
