---
title: AI healthcare automation startup Coral raises $12.5M, led by Lightspeed and Z47
description: AI healthcare automation startup Coral has raised a $12.5M seed led by Lightspeed and Z47 to automate prior authorization, intake and paperwork for US specialty providers.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-04-20T12:27:24.175Z
updated: 2026-06-03T13:10:36.132Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/coral-healthcare-automation-seed-lightspeed-z47
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/coral-team.webp
categories: Artificial Intelligence, Startups
content_type: Spotlight
region: New York
publication: Sovereign Magazine
about:
  - type: Organization
    name: Coral
    description: Coral is a New York-based AI company building automation software for US specialty healthcare providers. Its platform handles patient intake, prior authorization, fax processing, and follow-up communications, connecting to existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals. Customers include durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers, infusion centers, and specialty pharmacies. Founded in 2024 by Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty.
    url: https://www.trycoral.ai
    foundingDate: 2024-01-01T12:00:00.000Z
    industry: Healthcare AI
    sameAs:
      - https://www.linkedin.com/company/trycoral
---

Coral, an AI company building automation software for US healthcare providers, has raised a $12.5 million seed round led by [Lightspeed](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/triomics-raises-22m-oncology-ai) and Z47. The New York-based startup sells into the specialty end of American healthcare, the corner of the system that runs on the heaviest paperwork load and the thinnest staffing margins, with its early customers drawn from durable medical equipment suppliers, infusion centers, and specialty pharmacies.

The platform handles patient intake, prior authorization, fax processing, and follow-up communications with payers and patients, plugging into the EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals that clinics already use rather than asking them to replace any of it. Coral says its document models operate at 99.7% accuracy on the file types that define the specialty back office, including handwritten fax forms, scanned insurance cards, and prior authorization templates. A complete patient intake, which in most specialty practices absorbs more than half an hour of coordinator time, now runs in under five minutes on the platform.

Coral was founded in 2024 by Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty, both graduates of IIIT Hyderabad who had previously worked together at LimeChat, a customer-automation SaaS business also backed by Lightspeed. Shrihari's route into the category started with a minor accident that pushed him through the US healthcare system for the first time. The clinical care worked; the follow-ups, forms, and authorizations did not, and the paperwork outlasted the injury itself. He and Mohanty began building Coral shortly after.

The company says it is now processing hundreds of thousands of patient workflows a month and has grown revenue roughly eightfold over the last seven months, to the low single-digit millions. The more interesting number sits one level deeper. A portion of Coral's customers are paying the full contract value upfront at signing, a pattern that is almost unheard of in enterprise healthcare software, where procurement cycles regularly run more than a year and payment is almost always milestoned. It is the kind of commercial signal investors tend to weigh more heavily than headline accuracy scores, and it is one of the reasons this round priced where it did.

## Provider-side versus payer-side healthcare automation

Most of the AI capital that has moved into [prior authorization](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/trifetch-1-9m-ai-specialty-clinics) over the past two years has gone to the payer side of the transaction. Cohere Health, which sells into health insurers, closed a $90 million Series C in May 2025. Anterior, which builds clinical AI for health plans, raised $40 million in February 2026. Infinitus has raised more than $100 million for [voice automation](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/the-phone-call-that-could-save-healthcare-how-prosper-ai-tackles-america-s-450-billion-admin-) used substantially by payers. These are well-capitalised businesses selling into a handful of large buyers with deep budgets and slow procurement.

Coral has taken the other side of the same problem. Its customers are the providers being denied, the DME suppliers, infusion centers, and specialty pharmacies whose staff spend their days on hold with those payers. The commercial shape is different: thousands of fragmented buyers rather than a dozen giants, smaller individual contracts, but a category with almost no modern software penetration and a staffing crunch that is getting worse rather than better. Specialty practices have been reassigning clinical support staff to chase prior authorizations for several years running, and the roles are hard to fill at almost any wage.

The round is also a vertical expression of a broader Lightspeed thesis. In a partner memo titled "Goodbye RPA. Hello Coral." published earlier in the year, the firm argued that LLM-driven agents will displace the scripted robotic process automation layer that currently runs much of healthcare's back office, on the basis that traditional RPA tools fail when the input is a handwritten fax form or a scanned insurance card rather than a structured screen. [Rohil Bagga](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/ai-agents-take-centre-stage-logicflo-s-2-7m-seed-backs-human-guided-automation-in-pharma), the partner leading the round, sits in Lightspeed's India arm, which also led Coral's $2 million pre-seed. Z47, the India-focused firm formerly known as Matrix Partners India, co-led.

## Inside Coral's healthcare automation roadmap

Coral will spend the round on engineering hires and product. The company recently shipped [voice and text workflows](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/superdial-s-15m-bet-will-voice-ai-finally-cut-us-healthcare-s-phone-bill) that handle follow-up calls and messages to payers, patients, and referral sources, the kind of volume that otherwise absorbs a full-time coordinator at a smaller practice. Next on the roadmap is an AI workflow builder that will let providers configure their own automations without custom development, together with an operations layer that surfaces data on payer-level denial rates, common rejection reasons, and stalled cases. The company says it is targeting 4x revenue growth by year-end and expanding further into radiology alongside its existing verticals.

**About Coral**

Coral is a New York-based AI company building automation software for US specialty healthcare providers. Its platform handles patient intake, prior authorization, fax processing, and follow-up communications, connecting to existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals. Customers include durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers, infusion centers, and specialty pharmacies. Founded in 2024 by Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty.

[Website](https://www.trycoral.ai)

## FAQ

**Q: Why does US healthcare still use fax machines?**
US healthcare remains one of the heaviest users of fax in any industry, moving billions of fax pages each year. The persistence is a function of interoperability and compliance rather than preference. Fax is HIPAA-compatible, works between any two healthcare entities regardless of which EHR system they run, and does not require the two sides to agree on a data standard in advance. Around 70% of clinical communication in the US still moves by fax, which is why automation layers that sit above the fax rather than replace it have become the pragmatic path forward.

**Q: What is prior authorization and why does it delay care?**
Prior authorization is the process by which a health insurer approves or denies coverage for a specific treatment, prescription, or device before it is provided. US physicians complete roughly 39 prior authorizations a week on average, absorbing 13 to 16 hours of staff time per practice. Only a small minority of the total runs on the HIPAA-mandated electronic standard; the rest moves through phone, fax, or payer portals, which is why the process accounts for significant delays in specialty care.

**Q: What is durable medical equipment?**
Durable medical equipment, or DME, refers to medically necessary equipment designed for repeated use, including wheelchairs, hospital beds, oxygen equipment, CPAP machines, infusion pumps, and diabetic testing supplies. DME is one of the most paperwork-intensive categories in US healthcare because Medicare requires certificates of medical necessity, prescriptions, and prior authorization for a substantial portion of items, largely processed by fax.

**Q: How does AI automate healthcare back-office work?**
AI in the healthcare back office generally combines document understanding, where machine learning models read unstructured inputs such as fax forms, insurance cards, and prior authorization templates, with agentic workflows that take action across the EHR, payer portals, and communication channels. Modern systems aim to complete end-to-end workflows such as patient intake, authorization, and follow-up rather than automate a single step, and operate in the 98-99% accuracy range on the document categories they are trained on.