RISA Labs announced it has raised a $3.5 million funding round to help healthcare organizations eliminate one of the most persistent barriers to timely cancer care: prior authorization delays. This seed funding round was led by Binny Bansal (Flipkart co-founder) with participation from Oncology Ventures, General Catalyst, z21 Ventures, ODD BIRD VC, and Ashish Gupta.
RISA Labs has shown that faster care is possible by dramatically reducing manual workflows and administrative burden. And the funding will accelerate deployments in the next 100 cancer centers across the country within the next two years.
Based in Silicon Valley, RISA was founded by IIT Kanpur alumni and repeat founders, Kshitij Jaggi (CEO) and Kumar Shivang (CTO), who have been friends for over a decade now, and who have previously built and scaled Urban Health. And their frustration with fragmented, slow, and error-prone healthcare workflows during that journey inspired the duo to take a systems-first approach, leading them to develop a foundational AI operating system that can simulate, understand, and orchestrate entire institutional workflows from end to end.
How RISA Works: RISA’s platform—Business Operating System as a Service (BOSS) is a a full-stack orchestration engine built for the vertical complexity of healthcare, Rather than depending on humans to push paperwork or brittle bots that break when systems change, BOSS decomposes complex workflows into micro-tasks.
Then it delegates them to a network of intelligent agents: LLMs, digital twins, and reinforcement learners, extending across an institution’s entire software stack. And this enables BOSS to create a parallel digital workforce, operating on behalf of teams. A 1,000-person institution would be able to function like a 2,000-person one overnight, with digital agents making up half the workforce.
Success Story: At a leading US cancer center, BOSS reduced prior authorization times from 30 minutes to under 5. And in just a few months, it processed over $1 million in medications, freed up 80% of staff time, and cut administrative costs by 66%.
RISA plans to extend across multiple nodes within the oncology ecosystem, setting itself up as the AI transformation partner for both operational and clinical workflows. This includes enabling coordination and intelligence across providers, life sciences organizations, and other stakeholders throughout a drug’s journey —extending the company’s long-term vision to build a unified layer for AI-driven orchestration in oncology.
KEY QUOTES:
“Prior authorizations remain one of the least automated parts of our healthcare system. In oncology, the stakes are higher. 70% of cancer patients experience delays in care because of prior authorization requirements. In 33% of those cases, the delay is one month—a time window that can increase the risk of death by 13% in certain cancer types. The current system isn’t just inefficient – it’s dangerous.”
Ben Freeberg, Managing Partner at Oncology Ventures
“We’ve had Windows, we’ve had Linux, we’ve had Mac, each OS helped humans extract more from machines. But now, we’re drowning in software. There’s too much of it, and a shortage of skilled labor to operate it. Software that was supposed to get work done has become work itself. BOSS is an AI OS designed for the post-ChatGPT era : where work is no longer about learning tools, but simply expressing intent.”
Kshitij Jaggi, co-founder and CEO of RISA Labs
“Cancer care is time sensitive. Every delay in treatment can affect outcomes. Prior authorizations continue to slow us down. What RISA is building is not just smart technology. It removes barriers so our teams can move faster and stay focused on what matters most: caring for patients.”
Dr. Jeffrey Vacirca, CEO of New York Cancer and Blood Specialists
“BOSS is low-entropy system design to bring flow state in system-2 thinking for LLMs; it aims to maximise AI agents’ usefulness for critical problems like oncology operations. Its orchestration layer then turns that intelligence into precise, real-time execution with integrations with systems of record like Flatiron Health’s EMR.”
Kumar Shivang, co-founder & CTO of RISA
“As AI agents unbundle the $4.6 trillion services industry, RISA’s BOSS leads the way—proven in oncology and built to scale.”
Binny Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart and lead investor
