Infinitus Systems is a Healthcare AI communication company that automates routine calls for leading brands. The company’s AI agents and AI copilots help healthcare companies offload thousands of hours of benefit verification, prior authorization, and pharmacy phone calls. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Infinitus Systems CEO and Co-founder Ankit Jain to learn more about the company.
Ankit Jain’s Background
What is Ankit Jain’s background? Jain said:
“Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay area in an entrepreneurial household, I always saw myself as someone who would focus on building companies from the ground up. After grad school, I joined a search engine startup that ended up being acquired by Google. At Google, I had the opportunity to help launch Google Play and lead a big part of the engineering team for it for a number of years. Those parts are now referred to as “cloud and AI” of Google Play. I left Google in 2013 to launch my first startup as a founder; it was a mobile intelligence startup called Quettra that eventually got acquired by a larger competitor named SimilarWeb.”
“In 2017, I returned to Google as Director of Engineering in the AI division and helped Google launch its AI-focused venture fund, Gradient Ventures, through which I invested in vertical and horizontal applications of AI. Our hypothesis was that within 10 years, AI would be woven into every company being built and the opportunity to really focus on investments in this space could yield huge returns. As more companies adopt AI, it’s becoming part of the underlying fabric of how we work and play, which is exciting to be a part of.”
Formation Of Infinitus Systems
How did the idea for Infinitus Systems come together? Jain shared:
“In 2018, Google demoed Google Duplex at its annual developer conference. During the demo, they showed off a voice assistant triggered by “Hey Google, make me a reservation at…” a spa, salon, or restaurant by making phone calls to the businesses and then confirming that the reservation was made. After seeing the demo, I told my wife about the breakthroughs in speech recognition, natural language processing and speech synthesis. She has spent over a decade working in healthcare and stopped me mid-sentence to say, “So you’re telling me these brilliant engineers built a machine that can talk and decided to automate spa reservations?” She said that she wished this same technology could be applied in healthcare – this was my ‘a-ha’ moment.”
“No one goes into healthcare to wait on hold to collect information over a phone call – people work in healthcare to serve patients. If we could automate all these phone calls, we could unlock time for all these providers to spend time with patients and their families, getting back to the roots of why they joined healthcare to begin with.”
“From that moment on, my mission was to create time for healthcare, and today Infinitus is fulfilling this promise by using AI to automate the collection of healthcare data that would traditionally require manual phone calls. These calls can be an hour long or more, and involve significant time waiting on hold for a payor agent. We’re helping unlock much-needed time for healthcare providers to spend on more meaningful, impactful work.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Jain reflected:
“We knew we couldn’t assume that humans at call centers would talk to a machine. So before my co-founder, Shyam Rajagopalan, and I gave up our jobs and decided to make Infinitus a real thing, we tried a test call to a payor. We called UnitedHealthcare, and it was a little bit of a gimmick at the time – we had recorded a robot-sounding voice saying, ‘Hi, this is Eva calling on behalf of Bruce Willis, and I’d like to collect benefits.’ The first agent we called hung up on us.”
“That was concerning, but Shyam suggested giving it a second try. And the second agent took the call. We were like, ‘Ah! This payor agent is talking to a machine!’ It was that moment of inspiration that made us go, there’s something real here. Let’s go build it.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Jain explained:
“We currently offer two categories of products:
“1.) Our AI agents, which make phone calls to commercial and government payors on behalf of healthcare providers, performing benefit verifications and prior authorization and prescription status checks for specialty medications – such calls can last an hour or more, and involve significant waits on hold. Or, in some cases, our agents can collect benefit verification 100% digitally. Infinitus then returns the collected data to our customers via API.”
“2.) We also offer AI copilots and released our first, FastTrack, which is available in general. FastTrack is an enterprise-ready AI copilot that enables healthcare staff, for example reimbursement specialists, to bypass tedious interactive voice response (IVR) systems and avoid hold times. This helps healthcare companies check the status of a claim, follow up on a prior authorization request, or complete a benefit verification to save significant time they can use to serve more patients.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Jain and the team faced in building the company? Jain acknowledged:
“Healthcare is an extremely challenging sector – there’s a reason so much data is still exchanged via fax! Change can be hard to implement. An enterprise healthcare-focused software company is unlike a consumer or SMB software company, where you can’t just build, launch, and scale something in a couple of weeks or months. The sales cycles are long, and the decision-makers conduct detailed ROI analyses and require deep relationships, which just takes time. The solution providers that succeed understand not only the challenges but the processes healthcare leaders need to follow, and so far, I think we’re doing a good job of being a partner that understands the landscape and can help navigate change.”
Evolution Of Infinitus Systems’ Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Jain noted:
“When we started Infinitus in 2019, many people thought we were crazy for attempting to take on such a challenge in one of the hardest industries to sell into. Back then, even cutting-edge natural language processing systems didn’t have the context windows nor the knowledge base to deal with such domain-specific jargon, conversation complexity, and healthcare-specific operating procedures (or SOPs).”
“But now, over five years in, our multi-model, multimodal AI platform is increasingly accomplishing harder and harder tasks. The longest call we processed so far this year was 3 hours and 15 minutes long and contained 306 conversational turns. Our platform now employs over 100 models, from highly performant shallow models to custom fine-tuned and in-house audio and text models to LLMs, which enable us to optimize the user experience during each phase of a call. Today, the parameters of our models range from dozens in shallow models to minimize latency, 100 million for our larger in-house models, to as much as 10 trillion in the GenAI models that we employ. On top of that, Infinitus employs human-in-the-loop machine learning before, during, and after each call.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Jain cited:
“We automated our first call in 2019. Earlier this year, we surpassed the threshold of having automated 4 million calls, an incredible feat. In January, we surpassed 46,025,752 minutes of audio processed since making our first call in 2019 – for perspective, that’s the equivalent of more than 7,666 days without sleep.”
“We now support 44% of the Fortune 50, support 98% of the largest payors by state, support over 1,000 therapies, and have impacted the workflows of over 125,000 providers.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Jain about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We helped Cencora, a Fortune 10 healthcare wholesaler and distributor that provides pharmaceuticals and pharmacy services to patients in long-term care, workers’ compensation, and specialty drug programs, by partnering with their patient support program. Infinitus helped do the work of hundreds of full-time workers while returning benefit verification data to them 4x faster than traditional methods. This has been huge for their organization, as they have struggled to keep up with staffing needs – especially in January, during the annual insurance re-verification period, when their benefit verification call needs can spike by a factor of 10x. Cencora integrated the Infinitus AI agent into their proprietary benefit verification ecosystem, and ‘the results were tremendous,’ according to Jeff Buck, Cencora’s VP of digital solutions.”
“Another customer we’ve helped is Fortrea Patient Access (hear directly from the Fortrea team here). Fortrea’s leadership thinks of the Infinitus AI agent as ‘the most productive member of [their] team,’ because it has unlocked 30 minutes per case it takes on for Fortrea’s staff. That’s time they would otherwise spend on the phone with payors, which they can now use to better interact with patients navigating their health journeys.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Jain assessed:
We are reducing the healthcare administrative burden (a $82.7B problem) while making it easier for patients to access and afford their medications. Today we are focused on specialty medications. They make up 2% of the scripts but account for over 50% of all drug spending in the United States. That segment alone we estimate to be at least an $18B addressable market.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Jain affirmed:
“Today, our primary competition is the status quo – meaning most healthcare organizations are relying on human staffers to make calls to payors, wait on hold, and collect the information they need. Infinitus can automate calls to payors end to end; we know the right numbers to call, how to navigate IVR, and how to collect the data our customers need – even if it means pushing back on a payor agent who is accidentally providing incorrect information. We can do this because of our world-class team of AI scientists, researchers, and engineers, along with our team of operators – our humans in the loop that help make sure we are continuously improving the autonomous abilities of our system.”
“Compared to the alternatives that do exist, the Infinitus AI platform uses a multi-model and multimodal approach to automating data collection tasks that traditionally take place over the phone. Our HIPAA- and SOC II-compliant AI platform has built-in guardrails to ensure consistency and the highest possible accuracy of the data we source.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Jain concluded:
“Our goal is to achieve what we’re calling a “wait-less” patient experience with the help of AI. What we mean by that is a future where we can remove all the hurdles that stand between a patient and access to the care they need. Studies have shown that the anxiety of waiting for test results or diagnoses can lead to worse outcomes, and yet at every step of the process, patients can feel like they’re running into nothing but delay.”
“Today, we are driving efficiency in the back office. Slowly but surely, we are connecting different healthcare entities’ data to each other. As we get a complete picture, we aim to create an experience for patients that allows them to peek into their healthcare journey’s back office processes at any point and, hopefully, reduce anxiety during a difficult time.”
“Industries beyond healthcare have embraced a wait-less customer experience – think about Amazon, which can tell you the number of stops left before your package hits your doorstep, or even the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. We aim to create such a wait-less experience for healthcare.”
