Durham, North Carolina-based Keebler Health, a company that offers an AI-based risk adjustment platform for healthcare providers, announced that it raised a $6 million seed round from several investors, including Freestyle Capital, MBX Capital, New Stack Ventures, Underdog Labs, Everywhere VC, Ludlow Ventures, Primordial, the Tweener Fund, the Hustle Fund, Deb Liu, and Bong Koh.
The company will utilize the funding round to expand its team and accelerate its product roadmap as demand for its solution accelerates rapidly. And this brings Keebler Health’s total funding to $7.8 million.
Keebler Health’s platform reduces the cost/time of medical records review by an order of magnitude while also accurately identifying disease burden to optimize payer reimbursement. This growth was driven primarily by the U.S. healthcare system’s move towards Value-Based Care (VBC). Through a VBC arrangement, providers take on risk and patient care costs in exchange for an annual payment from insurers.
Providers are incentivized to keep patients healthy and out of acute care by focusing on preventive care to catch and manage chronic conditions early when they are more easily treatable. Accurately assessing and adjusting risk is essential for these practices to thrive. But poor risk adjustment practices can lead to bankruptcy for a practice, and strong risk adjustment can make a practice successful while delivering better patient outcomes.
Providers have traditionally relied on staff to manually perform risk adjustment audits on a sample size of 5% to 10% of their patients—all that is practical when using human clinicians. Keebler Health customers are performing risk adjustment on 100% of their patients—in near real-time review. In head-to-head evaluations, Keebler Health outperforms clinical teams in terms of depth, speed, and accuracy. On average, providers that move from manual risk adjustment to Keebler Health identify 15% to 30% more disease burden.
Company co-founders Isaac Park and Andrew Stickney met through friends and learned they both had an interest in health technologies. Park’s interest was driven by a personal health issue, while Stickney’s stemmed from the observation of inefficiencies and expenses in the revenue cycle management process. The two also teamed up with third co-founder Kevin Hill, a former colleague of Stickney’s and health AI expert with a PhD in Neuroscience, to solve that problem and help providers thrive in VBC environments.
Keebler Health had launched its platform in June 2024 and signed major clients who are more accurately measuring disease burden and optimizing reimbursement without increasing staff.
KEY QUOTES:
“Keebler Health is transforming the economics of Value-Based Care with AI that doesn’t just improve efficiency but unlocks new possibilities for providers. As healthcare rapidly shifts toward value-based models, Keebler Health’s technology is poised to be a foundational layer in this transformation. We’re thrilled to support the team in driving this shift.”
– Jenny Lefcourt, General Partner at Freestyle VC
“Keebler’s platform can ingest massive amounts of data in almost any form – from handwritten notes to images – and fully process it with AI to find emerging conditions that human clinicians may have missed. The goal is to reduce provider risk and improve operational performance while improving patient outcomes.”
“Reducing administrative burdens for providers is critical for helping the U.S. healthcare system focus on preventive care. Keebler Health flags issues, makes recommendations and provides evidence for those recommendations, allowing clinicians to review and make final decisions. Automating this process with AI saves countless hours that providers can then spend with patients.”
– Isaac Park, co-founder and CEO of Keebler Health
