- Charta Health just raised an $8.1 million seed round from Bain Capital Ventures.
- Charta’s founders left Rockset, which OpenAI acquired last year, to start the healthcare AI company.
- The startup, which uses AI to review patient charts, got $500,000 in contracts within 60 days.
Justin Liu and Scott Morris didn’t have any healthcare experience when they left Rockset, the AI infrastructure startup that OpenAI acquired in June. This month, they’re announcing an $8.1 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures for their new healthcare AI startup, the company told Business Insider exclusively.
Liu and Morris left Rockset in 2023 to dig deeper into healthcare, the industry in which they felt the tech could make the biggest impact. The two spent a year getting their medical coding credentials and interviewing over 100 healthcare professionals to figure out what healthcare technologies were worth building.
That exploration turned into Charta Health, which is using AI to automate patient chart reviews to help providers capture more revenue and reduce their administrative burdens.
Providers have to review patient charts to make decisions about patient care and select the right medical codes for billing. However, manual chart reviews can be time-consuming, potentially reducing the amount of time providers can spend with their patients and driving up costs.
Charta Health’s AI automates that review process for a range of tasks, including helping to identify missed codes to increase provider revenue, flagging potential issues before billing to prevent claims denials, and ensuring the charts comply with payers’ complex documentation requirements.
Charta began its outreach to potential clients through a series of cold emails. Within 60 days, those emails landed the startup $500,000 in revenue — all before Charta launched from stealth in June 2024.
That initial traction quickly brought Charta to profitability, leading Liu and Morris to reevaluate their strategy and pursue venture funding to focus on growth instead of sustaining early profits. “We didn’t realize just how big of an opportunity this was going to be,” Liu said.
SV Angel, South Park Commons, SpringRock Ventures, Refract Ventures, and strategic angel investors contributed to Charta’s Bain-led seed round. The startup also hired Dr. Caesar Djavaherian, cofounder and chief clinical innovation officer of healthcare clinic startup Carbon Health, as its chief medical officer.
Healthcare executives and investors have been clamoring for AI-powered solutions to automate administrative tasks in healthcare as the industry struggles with a staffing crisis and low hospital margins. Dozens of startups have grabbed funding to address various tasks in that bucket, like CodaMetrix, which raised a $40 million Series B in March to analyze clinical notes and derive medical codes for billing and claims using AI.
Liu said Charta sets itself apart by offering solutions for a broad variety of use cases and personalizing the platform to its clients’ needs. He said almost all of Charta’s clients use the company’s tech for multiple tasks related to patient chart reviews.
“Ultimately, the vision here is that we will create this layer that allows you to perform these chart reviews for any kind of use case at any point inside the revenue or care cycle,” Liu said.
The startup typically works with high-volume, low-reimbursement specialties like primary care, urgent care, and behavioral healthcare. Charta Health focuses on outpatient settings, setting it apart further from healthcare AI startups like SmarterDx, which uses AI to analyze patient charts for inpatient care.
Liu said Charta plans to use most of the seed funding to build out its sales team to land more contracts, as well as for product expansion as the company looks to tackle more use cases for chart reviews in different specialties.
