Seattle startup Cascade Health raised a $2 million pre-seed round to boost its AI-powered software that aims to increase healthcare pricing transparency.
Cascade aims to make navigating pricing information easier for enterprises and consumers by using data recently made public by hospitals and insurance companies.
Ana-Maria Constantin and Pulak Goyal co-founded the startup last year. Both founders attended Harvard and worked at Microsoft’s AI and cloud computing departments for nearly six years before launching Cascade.
The duo noticed a trend with healthcare pricing transparency. New laws passed in 2021 and 2022 require hospitals and insurance companies to disclose pricing information, resulting in the release of massive datasets related to healthcare costs.
While the pricing information is publicly available, the data can’t be opened by a home computer or a cloud machine alone, Constantin said. This means AI systems are required to process the information, combine it with other datasets, and derive insights, she said.
By aggregating the data in real time, Cascade’s platform can sort, query, and transform it into a readable menu. This makes it easily navigable and usable by employers, insurance companies, consumers, hospitals, and government agencies.
Cascade sells this tech to enterprises through its API. The company has customers, but Constantin decline to provide specific details.
Cascade is also rolling out a new GPT-based chatbot that can answer questions about insurance coverage and costs using natural language prompts.
Several startups emerged in the healthcare transparency industry after the laws made pricing data publicly accessible. Cascade’s competitors include Sidecar Health, which raised $125 million in funding in January 2021; Turquoise Health, which raised $20 million last year from Tiger Global and A16Z; and CashMD, which launched a pricing transparency tool in 2019.
Cascade differentiates because it manages both data access and hosting infrastructure, which can otherwise be costly for enterprises who want to build it themselves, Constantin said. The company is also positioned because of its engineering team and experience, she said.
Cascade, formerly called Gondwana, was a finalist at the 2022 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Constantin herself is a finalist for this year’s GeekWire Young Entrepreneur of the Year award at the GeekWire Awards.
New York-based early stage venture firm AlleyCorp led the pre-seed round.
