Penguin Ai has completed a $29.7 million financing round aimed at tackling the massive administrative burden that weighs down the healthcare industry. Greycroft led the company’s Series A round with $25 million in new capital, and it also attracted support from UPMC Enterprises, SemperVirens, Snowflake Ventures, Watershed Ventures, and Horizon Mutual Holdings. Early backers ManchesterStory and Overwater Ventures joined the latest financing, along with the California Health Care Foundation and industry veterans who helped seed the company last year.
The new funding comes as hospitals, health plans, and clinics continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on paperwork, prior authorizations, and claims processing. Penguin Ai’s platform uses advanced generative AI to automate those routine, high-volume tasks and replace manual workflows with digital workers and purpose-built language models. By streamlining approvals, coding, and appeals, the company aims to free up staff time and reduce operational expenses for both payers and providers.
Led by Fawad Butt, a former chief data officer at UnitedHealthcare, Kaiser Permanente, and Optum, Penguin Ai has assembled a leadership team with more than a century of combined experience in payer, provider, and high-tech roles. That expertise has shaped a healthcare-native AI platform that goes beyond simple point solutions. Customers can tap into pre-built models for tasks like medical coding and claims adjudication or configure custom agents for their own back-office processes.
Early partnerships demonstrate the platform’s potential. Penguin Ai has already teamed up with leading health plans and provider groups to pilot its digital workers, and it is collaborating with technology organizations to integrate its models into broader data ecosystems. One high-profile example brings Penguin Ai’s secure, compliant AI tools directly into the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, making it easier for healthcare organizations to deploy new workflows without juggling multiple vendors.
The new funding will be used to expand the product development team, accelerate roadmap priorities and scale customer deployments across both payer and provider networks. As Penguin Ai rolls out new language models and refines its AI-driven agents, it expects to help customers shave hours from every claims cycle, eliminate errors in authorization requests, and cut tens of millions of dollars from administrative budgets.
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“The healthcare industry is plagued by inefficiencies and is spending billions on administrative tasks annually. By harnessing the power of generative AI, we can significantly reduce these costs, improve accuracy, and unburden valuable resources so payers and providers can focus on delivering quality care to patients.”
Fawad Butt, founder and CEO of Penguin Ai, and former chief data officer of UnitedHealthcare, Kaiser Permanente and Optum
“Since partnering with Penguin Ai over a year ago, we’ve been impressed with their bold platform vision and early customer traction. We’re excited to see them accelerate their go-to-market initiatives and further advance their next-generation AI platform.”
Mark Terbeek, partner at Greycroft
“At UPMC Enterprises, we innovate to solve real world problems in health care, which is a mindset shared by Penguin Ai and its founder, Fawad Butt. Security and fairness, which have always been priorities in health care, are particularly crucial when incorporating AI into medical practice. Penguin Ai’s platform capabilities, specifically their comprehensive governance and bias correction, service those existing needs, while also preparing for future demands in this evolving AI market.”
Nicholas Shapiro, vice president, UPMC Enterprises, the innovation, commercialization, and venture capital arm of UPMC
“We invested in Penguin Ai because of its full-service healthcare platform vision and because the technology is fully AI native from the ground up and built by former executives from leading payer and provider organizations. The company is entirely focused on automating complex and costly workflows within healthcare, and we believe their platform will benefit our LPs and strategic partners who want to leverage one solution rather than work with numerous vendors who offer AI-enhanced point solutions.”
Robby Peters, founder and managing partner at SemperVirens
“Penguin Ai is redefining how healthcare payers and providers use data and AI to cut costs, reduce friction, and improve outcomes. Our investment brings their specialized applications directly into the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, giving healthcare organizations the confidence to embrace AI and transform their operations.”
Harsha Kapre, director of Snowflake Ventures
