- AKASA (formerly known as Alpha Health) recently announced that it has raised $60 million in its series B round of funding. These are the details.
AKASA (formerly known as Alpha Health) — the first Unified Automation company for revenue cycle management in healthcare — announced recently that it has raised $60 million in its series B round of funding. And the funding will enable the company to invest in high caliber talent across the organization; scale operations to meet rapidly growing customer demand; continue to accelerate delivery of products to customers; and further invest in sales and marketing to expand market presence.
BOND had led the series B round and Noah Knauf, a general partner at BOND, will join the company’s board. And existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Costanoa Ventures are also participating in the round.
AKASA provides hospitals with Unified Automation services such as a flexible AI-based solution that automates complex operational tasks such as those related to revenue cycle management. And AKASA’s unique approach imbues the entire automation process with human judgment and subject matter expertise. The Unified Automation operates within a hospital’s existing electronic health record (EHR) and revenue cycle infrastructure to reduce errors and improve efficiencies.
The AKASA brand is going to better scale with the company’s ambitions over the long term. And is a Sanskrit word that refers to sky, space, or aether. And in medieval science, there were four classic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Akasa or aether was a proposed “5th element” used to explain a number of natural phenomena that were not scientifically understood at the time.
AKASA enables providers to efficiently navigate financial and operational complexity of revenue cycle operations — which is a key driver of healthcare costs in the United States. And AKASA’s Unified Automation adapts to the highly dynamic nature of revenue cycle operations and has been purpose-built for healthcare. Plus AKASA enables hospitals to decrease their cost to collect so they can invest more in patient care and be better stewards of the healthcare dollar.
AKASA’s models and algorithms have been trained on over 178 million claims and remittances. And AKASA uses HIPAA and HITRUST compliant web and cloud services. Plus the company follows National Institute of Standards (NIST) 800-53 at the moderate level and its BitSight rating of 812 makes AKASA an industry leader in security practices.
KEY QUOTES:
“Unified Automation™ can be deployed entirely remotely, and our proprietary expert-in-the-loop interface with AKASA’s team of revenue cycle specialists ensures exceptions and edge cases are resolved while the system learns in real-time from the actions they take. With continuous machine-learning built-in, the need for costly or time-consuming upgrades and maintenance is eliminated.”
— Varun Ganapathi, PhD, co-founder and CTO of AKASA
“The company has seen tremendous response to our unique approach to automation. We are incredibly optimistic about the coming year and our long-term opportunity to serve as a catalyst for improving efficiency in our healthcare system at scale. We remain focused on our mission to remedy financial complexity in order to reduce healthcare costs for everyone.”
— Malinka Walaliyadde, co-founder and CEO of AKASA
“The opportunity to eliminate or reduce costs associated with administrative ‘back office’ functions in healthcare is monumental. AKASA and its world-class team has developed an incredibly innovative approach to automation. I look forward to joining the Board at such a pivotal moment in the company’s growth trajectory.”
— Noah Knauf, general partner at BOND
“We have been impressed with the AKASA team’s expertise in revenue cycle operations. They were able to deploy Unified Automation™ quickly and we’ve seen the system adjust to process changes in real-time. We’ve also had significant improvements in our revenue cycle operations over the past several months as our business office staff has had a greater opportunity to work at the ‘top of their license’ by focusing on more difficult claims while automation has handled claim status checks and other time consuming tasks that are necessary but are a less strategic use of our staff’s time and talent.”
— Jeff Francis, vice president and CFO of Methodist Health System
