Exclusive: Translucent, an AI-native healthcare finance startup, raises $27 million Series A |
Exclusive: Translucent, an AI-native healthcare finance startup, raises $27 million Series A
Jack O’Hara has seen a hospital shut down.
It happens via blurry paperwork and running out of time. O’Hara, through COVID, was chief information and transformation officer at Illinois-based medical center Springfield Clinic. And he and his team were feverishly trying to figure out why the financials of the system’s northern rural market were so wildly off. Data was diffuse at best, and Excel files were “wheel of death-ing.” And come the next board meeting, lacking clarity, leadership shut it all down.
And by that time, it wasn’t just a chaotic financial problem, it was a human problem.
“Patients, for weeks and weeks later, were saying ‘where am I going to get care now?’” said O’Hara. “And I was like, ‘holy crap, this is really painful.’ They had to drive three hours to come to our main sites. And one in three Americans are in this health desert. When care gets shut down, it’s a huge problem.”
Three years later, O’Hara remains entrenched in the messy economics of hospitals. Healthcare business rules run upside down. Consider: In a “normal” business, you receive a good or service, pay for it there, move on. In healthcare, you see the doctor, there’s probably a copay, and then the real bill shows up months later. (And even then, what the service cost and what the provider gets paid could be different.) So, cash management for hospitals is a moving-target-game of fuzzy, delayed data. Payer middlemen, high labor and facilities costs, and a politically-shifting landscape add to the mix.
“It’s a massive problem, that this $5 trillion industry is essentially operating at a 1% margin,” said O’Hara. “Hospitals are almost forecasting into a fog.”
O’Hara founded Translucent, an AI-native healthcare finance startup, in 2024 with this idea—that every hospital should have its own AI “financial leader” that always monitors data and offers specific suggestions. The company raised its $7 million seed round in August, and now has raised its $27 million Series A, Fortune has exclusively learned. GV led the round, with participation from NEA, FPV Ventures, and Virtue.
“Imagine: It’s 9 PM, and I have to pull from seven different systems, then put it into........