Mandolin, a leading AI automation platform for specialty drug access, announced that it has raised $40 million in funding from Greylock Partners, SignalFire, Maverick, SV Angel, along with Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo!) and Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel). Launched by repeat entrepreneurs Will Yin (CEO) and Rohit Rustagi (COO), Mandolin is utilized by many of the nation’s largest infusion providers, pharmacies, and health systems.
What Mandolin does: Mandolin’s AI platform automates the end-to-end administrative side of infused and injectable drug delivery for providers. Mandolin’s AI agents act just like your best employees, completing tasks like reasoning about clinical policies, calling payers, parsing faxes and handwritten notes, and making decisions across entire workflows. And they integrate into existing electronic health records (EHRs), payer portals, and manufacturer hubs. By centralizing operational logic and real-time decision-making into a single platform, Mandolin reduces time-to-treatment from weeks to days, lowers back-office costs, improves billing accuracy, and unlocks visibility into drug usage and patient pathways.
Since launching its product in January, it has gained traction fast. Mandolin is already working with many of the largest US infusion providers, pharmacies, and health systems, including Vivo Infusion, FlexCare Infusion, OI Infusion, TwelveStone Health Partners, and Amber Specialty Pharmacy. Across its customer base, Mandolin is deployed in over 700 clinic locations and serves more than 250,000 new patients annually.
Problem being addressed: Some recent advances in drug development have caused a surge of specialty therapies addressing rare and chronic conditions like cancers, immune disorders, and Alzheimer’s. Specialty therapies represented hundreds of billions in drug spend last year and it is expected to surpass $1 trillion over the next few years.
Unlike traditional drugs bought at retail pharmacies, these drugs are usually administered by healthcare professionals in a clinical setting. And they are also processed through an arduous administrative process established by insurance companies, often delaying patients’ access to life-changing treatments by weeks.
Mandolin’s founders: Mandolin’s founders, Will Yin and Rohit Rustagi, have a passion and vision for improving our healthcare system using AI. After initially pursuing academic research on conditions like Alzheimer’s and cancer that have impacted their families, they saw first-hand the difficulty and delays associated with specialty drug approvals. Seeing how broken the healthcare system was for accessing these treatments, combined with the insight that large language models could now reason like the best performing employees, they joined forces to start Mandolin in 2024.
KEY QUOTES:
“Insurance companies make the approval process challenging for specialty medications. Infusion providers, pharmacies, and health systems spend an excessive amount of manpower on basic tasks like checking insurance coverage, submitting prior authorizations, or verifying reimbursement amounts, which take weeks of time per prescription and lead to millions in bad debt. Leveraging the latest advancements in AI, we saw an opportunity to build autonomous agents that can tackle these workflows for providers in minutes and more reliably.”
Will Yin, CEO and co-founder of Mandolin
“Mandolin has been nothing short of transformational for our business. Tasks that used to take days, now happen in under an hour. We’ve automated key workflows across billing, patient communication, and insurance verification, driving real gains in terms of better cash flow and the reduction of headcount as we scale. Mandolin acts as an AI employee integrated directly into our core systems. We just tell it what needs to get done, and it does the work.”
Cannon Loughry, COO of TwelveStone
“Will and Rohit saw the opportunity to bring agentic AI into a system drowning in paperwork, delays, and revenue leakage. Despite being founded a year ago, Mandolin is already proving that AI agents can unlock faster treatment for patients and far better economics for providers. We at Greylock are thrilled to partner with them on their journey.”
Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Partners
