The New York startup has developed AI technology that interprets handwritten fax forms, processes prior authorizations, and completes patient intakes in less than five minutes, without requiring providers to change their workflow. It has generated millions in revenue within its first year and aims for 4x growth by the end of 2026.
Coral, a New York-based AI startup automating administrative workflows for specialty healthcare providers, has secured $12.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed and Z47.
Founded in 2024 by Ajay Shrihari, an expert in robotics and AI, and Aniket Mohanty, with a background in medical image processing, Coral has quickly achieved significant annual revenue and aims to expand its growth fourfold by 2026.
Coral addresses the challenge of administrative volume rather than technological complexity. In American healthcare, each appointment creates a trail of prior authorization requests, referral packets, insurance eligibility checks, and discharge paperwork. Much of this process relies on fax machines, which are ingrained in clinical workflows despite being outdated technology.
Instead of replacing fax infrastructure, which would require providers to rebuild systems they cannot afford to change, Coral connects to existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals to automate processes. Providers maintain their usual workflow while Coral modifies what happens within it.
Starting with the durable medical equipment sector, one of the most fax-reliant areas of outpatient care, Coral streamlined processes where a single order often requires multiple documentation rounds. DASCO, a home medical equipment provider, has seen response times reduce from hours or days to minutes.
Coral expanded its model to infusion centers, where delayed authorizations can mean missed doses, and into specialty pharmacy. Administrative bottlenecks appeared consistently across different verticals. The product’s core capability is understanding documents despite healthcare’s complexity: processing handwritten fax forms, scanned insurance cards, prior authorization templates, and payer portal interfaces.
Coral’s AI models have achieved 99.7% accuracy across these document types, a required standard in healthcare to avoid clinical and financial errors. Patient intakes, even for complex cases, are now completed in under five minutes. The platform addresses information gaps without staff intervention by coordinating with payers, patients, and referral sources.
The most notable commercial signal is payment behavior, not just revenue. Some of Coral’s customers pay the full contract value upfront, unusual for enterprise software, especially in a sector with typically slow and risk-averse vendor evaluation processes. This shift is due to the immediate and visible ROI from reducing workflow times from hours to under five minutes with high accuracy.
Coral introduced AI-powered voice and text workflows to automate follow-ups with payers, patients, and referral sources, replacing manual phone calls.
The next product development phase includes an AI workflow builder for providers to design administrative processes without IT involvement and a co-pilot layer offering operational intelligence from platform data: identifying payers with high denial rates, pinpointing authorization process bottlenecks, assessing reliable referral sources, and suggesting improvements for insurance claim resubmissions.
Rohil Bagga from Lightspeed described Coral as “delivering real outcomes at scale” in an environment where legacy automation often falls short. Ashwin KP from Z47 highlighted the investment thesis on healthcare administration’s unique characteristics: over a trillion dollars in annual overhead, chronically underserved by technology, and needing deep vertical expertise to address these challenges.
The Series A funding will support team growth and product development, with Coral enhancing its engineering capabilities and adding professionals with extensive experience in healthcare operations.