Last year, Chris Heckler was coming to the end of a five-year non-compete after selling his last company, a healthcare startup. “I was sitting on the sidelines doing angel investing and I realized I was too young to retire,” he told TechCrunch. “I wanted to get back into it.”
At the same time, Joseph Akintolayo had just sold his fintech company. He, too, had a non-competition, but was tossed around with ideas for a company. He knew Heckler, as Akintolayo had once served as a consultant on one of his projects.
In this downtime, however, they wanted to come together—Heckler, with his connections, and Akintolayo, with his knowledge of artificial intelligence and supply chains—to try to create something new.
The result was SpendRulewhich launched last summer as an AI-powered platform that helps healthcare systems track their spending. The company came out of stealth on Tuesday, with $2 million in funding in a round led by Abundant Venture Partners. Others in the round include MemorialCare Innovation Fund and Zeal Capital Partners.
Right now, if an item has a barcode, health systems use a triple match, said Akintolayo, the company’s CTO, that links a purchase to an invoice. However, many times health systems have purchases and contracts (such as maintenance, janitorial services, translation services or laundry) that do not have barcodes or easily identifiable proof of purchase.
Because these types of purchases can often be difficult and complex to manage, overspending is quite common. SpendRule is a technology that ensures hospitals only pay what they have negotiated in their contracts. It is integrated with and works on top of a hospital system’s current enterprise resource planning software, contract management software, and accounts payable workflows, pulling information from contracts, invoices, internal databases, and vendor data to validate invoices before payment is issued.
It points out discrepancies and tells teams when to pay and when not to. Typically, hospitals hire an auditor every two years to perform this function or manually audit each invoice. It was a tedious task that needed to be automated in this current wave of artificial intelligence. Already, big names like Kettering Health, MemorialCare and MUSC Health are using the platform, Akintolayo said.
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Heckler and Akintolayo only started the company last summer, but managed to close a circle by Halloween, largely because of Heckler’s connections in the industry. “We were able to close this seed round painlessly and use it to grow the team to support customers,” he said. The new capital will be used to hire and continue to develop the company’s AI infrastructure.
Heckler said SpendRule considers existing invoice checkers its competition, such as SpendMend and GHX. But Akintolayo said again, a key difference is SpendRule’s focus on purchasing services, the kind of things hospitals buy that don’t have bar codes.
“Our goal is to build a more resilient hospital system,” Akintolayo said. “That’s our vision. To protect everyone’s bottom line by connecting their data and helping them make better decisions.”
