Solace is a healthcare advocacy marketplace that connects patients and families with professional advocates who help them make decisions and navigate the complexities of the U.S. healthcare system. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Solace CEO and Co-Founder Jeremy Gurewitz to learn more.
Jeremy Gurewitz’s Background
When asked about his background and the experiences that led him to establish Solace, Gurewitz shared:
I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Solace, a healthcare advocacy company I started with my co-founder, Sara Sargent, after seeing how difficult it is for patients and families to navigate the U.S. healthcare system. Solace connects people with professional healthcare advocates who can help them make decisions and navigate that complexity.
I started my career in quantitative finance, but venture-backed startups offered the opportunity to build things that could have a more direct impact on people’s lives. Before founding Solace, I helped build and scale several mission-driven consumer companies, including leading growth and marketing at Imperfect Foods and Literati. I believe in building technology that serves humanity, and that’s what we’re building at Solace.
How Solace Started
When discussing how the idea for Solace came together, Gurewitz explained:
In 2016, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was an accomplished radiologist with deep medical expertise and excellent insurance. None of that actually mattered. We struggled so much to navigate her diagnosis, and I saw firsthand how broken the U.S. healthcare system can be, no matter your background. I thought, if it’s this bad for us, how terrible is this experience for everyone?
After my mom’s diagnosis, I started studying the system more structurally, and I was struck by the lack of ownership. Responsibility for a patient’s care is distributed across providers, pharmacies, and insurers. No one makes sure referrals and prior authorizations go through, doctors are talking to each other, or patients actually understand their treatment options. That connective tissue simply didn’t exist.
Then I learned about healthcare advocates. These are healthcare professionals who work with patients throughout their care journey, helping them coordinate providers, understand options, and make decisions. The work they do is incredibly valuable, but very few people know the role exists, and there has never been a clear way for patients to find them. We built Solace to solve that problem.
Helping Patients At Scale
When asked about his favorite memories from working at Solace, Gurewitz recalled:
Two moments really stand out. Helping our first patient is a powerful memory. Solace was something I believed in deeply, but our first patient testimonial made it real. An advocate was able to dramatically improve this patient’s situation, and it was striking to hear the impact.
The other moment is when we reached 20,000 patients a month. I looked at the tracker where we keep every review, and it was just staggering. There were hundreds of pages of stories from people we’ve helped. I saw patients whose medications or equipment had been approved after months of denials and people who received life-changing support after difficult diagnoses.
It was a powerful picture of how broken the system is for everyone and how massive an opportunity we have to truly improve people’s lives.
Healthcare Advocacy Platform
When describing Solace’s core products and features, Gurewitz detailed:
Solace connects patients with trained healthcare advocates who help manage the most complex parts of their care. This includes everything from researching treatment options, coordinating between providers, handling scheduling and referrals, managing insurance approvals and appeals, and staying involved until patients get the care they need.
We’ve built proprietary technology, utilizing AI to take administrative burdens off of patients and advocates, and clinical infrastructure to support that work, but our core product is the human relationship itself. Every patient works one-on-one with a dedicated advocate whose background fits their needs.
Our platform gives advocates the technology and structure they need to do what they do best, which is help people.
Building Patient Trust
When asked about challenges in the healthcare advocacy sector and how Solace has addressed them, Gurewitz noted:
One of the biggest challenges in our sector is trust. Healthcare is deeply personal, and asking people to share sensitive information with a new kind of service requires a huge focus on privacy, clear value delivery, and real human connection.
We keep humans at the center of the experience and support our advocates with strong clinical oversight and HIPAA-compliant technology. We’ve invested heavily in training and quality to protect every patient and allow advocates to build long-term relationships, and we use our technology to augment those relationships.
Technology Evolution
When discussing how Solace’s technology has evolved since launching, Gurewitz described:
Solace today is the same fundamental product we were building at launch. We’re continually investing in the platform and have built a huge number of features, all focused on providing the best experience to every patient, providing the best experience to every advocate, and eliminating any friction in the connectivity between the two.
Major Company Milestones
When asked about Solace’s most significant milestones, Gurewitz said:
What a question. I go back to our first moments: the first time we successfully helped a patient and the first time we were able to accept insurance, when we expanded into Medicare and Medicare Advantage coverage in early 2024. That allowed us to support patients on a much wider scale and brought advocacy within reach of millions of Americans who need care the most.
This April, we expanded coverage to most major commercial insurance plans, including UnitedHealthcare and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. Medicare proved advocacy belongs inside the care experience. Commercial coverage is what makes it available to nearly everyone.
The partnerships matter just as much. We’ve teamed up with DAV and The American Legion to help veterans navigate care they receive outside the VA, and we joined the National Health Council as an Associate Member in June.
Every round of funding has been another vote of confidence that advocacy is the future: our Series A in 2024 with Inspired Capital, our Series B in 2025 with Menlo Ventures, and our recent Series C with IVP.
We intend to make healthcare advocacy a new standard of U.S. healthcare, and each day brings us closer to that reality.
Restoring Quality Of Life
When invited to share a specific patient success story, Gurewitz explained:
We have so many stories, but we also want to be sensitive to the personal nature of healthcare. We recently had the privilege of speaking with a patient, let’s call him Joe*, who came to us with heart problems and neurological symptoms that had gone unexplained for years.
His partner was dealing with a traumatic brain and spinal injury and was somehow also acting as Joe’s caregiver. They had been looking for answers for years before they found Solace.
Their advocate, Victoria, brought the right specialists together and pushed Joe’s care team to take his concerns seriously. He was finally diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and was able to begin a treatment that worked. Caregivers shoulder a lot of the burden, and the advocate also worked with Joe’s partner to organize her appointments and therapy as well.
When we spoke to them, Joe had just gotten back into playing in a band and writing music, and his partner was able to go back to being a partner instead of his caregiver. A large part of what we do at Solace is restoring the quality of life that illness threatens to take away. People deserve to focus on their lives, not just their healthcare.
*Name changed to protect privacy.
More Than $200 Million Raised
When asked about Solace’s funding and growth metrics, Gurewitz specified:
To date, Solace has raised over $200 million in venture funding, including a recent $130 million Series C led by IVP that valued the company at unicorn status, above $1 billion.
We’re primarily using that capital to scale our engineering, product, and design teams. We’re also expanding partnerships nationwide to bring advocacy to more patients, and we’re building a research function to study and publish data on the clinical and financial impact of advocacy.
Over the past year, we’ve seen 10x growth, which speaks to the intense demand we’ve seen from patients.
Solace’s Differentiators
When asked what differentiates Solace from its competition, Gurewitz emphasized:
We don’t view Solace as having direct competition. Our biggest competitor is no action at all.
The core problem Solace is solving is that patients in the U.S. healthcare system don’t have a single person they can go to for helping them navigate care. That gap has existed in the system for a long time.
Healthcare advocates have historically filled that role, but the industry has been small and largely invisible to patients. Most people don’t know the role exists, and there has never been a scalable way to connect patients with high-quality advocates.
We’ve built a platform that allows patients and families to find, work with, and stay connected to expert healthcare advocates throughout their care journey. So, when people ask about competition, I tend to think about the status quo more than individual companies.
The real alternative to Solace today is navigating the healthcare system alone, and that’s the experience we intend to replace.
Future Goals
When discussing Solace’s future goals, Gurewitz concluded:
Healthcare advocacy should be as standard as primary care. Every patient should have access to an advocate when they enter the healthcare system.
We’ve cleared the coverage hurdle. Solace is now available through Medicare and most major commercial plans, so the near-term work shifts to depth rather than access: growing our advocacy network, embedding advocacy earlier in the care journey with payer and provider partners and publishing our own research on what advocacy does to outcomes and cost.
Longer term, Solace will become the connective tissue of healthcare. Advocates will help patients move seamlessly across providers, benefits, and settings of care.
We can meaningfully reduce the stress and financial burden that so many families experience when someone gets sick. Healthcare advocacy will play a central role in how patients navigate care.
