Previous, a company that uses artificial intelligence to speed up health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million valuation after money led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investors Sequoia, who led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last Septemberand Neo, an accelerator that helped launch the company in the summer of 2022, also participated in the Series A funding.
The round also included a number of angel investors, including Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, who was hired by Microsoft in March to lead the tech giant’s consumer AI division.
NEA and Anterior did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anterior, formerly known as Co:helm, was founded by Abdel Mahmoud, a former doctor who left medicine to pursue a master’s degree in computer science and a career in technology after becoming disillusioned with the time spent in administrative functions. than with patience.
The company has built an LLM co-pilot that helps nurses and doctors save hours in gathering medical documents required by insurance. The Anterior solution aims to reduce denial rates and accelerate patient access to care.
While Anterior’s initial offering is in prior approval automation, the company eventually plans to expand into other medical administrative functions.
Mohamad Makhzoumi, general partner in NEA’s healthcare group and co-CEO of the firm, has joined Anterior’s board of directors. Makhzoumi’s investments include Tempus, a genomic testing and data analytics company founded by Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky, which plans to IPO next week at a valuation up to $6.1 billion. Makhzoimi also backed Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup that launched this year with $1 billion in funding.
Anterior competes with Cohere Health, another prior authorization automation provider, which raised a $50 million round in February led by Deerfield Managementwith participation from Business Definition, Flare Capital Partners, Longitude capital and Polaris Partnersbringing the five-year-old company’s total funding to $106 million.
