How Assured is building the automation layer for healthcare administration

When Assured Cofounders Varun Krishnamurthy and Rahul Shivkumar were building their previous virtual sleep clinic startup, Dawn Health, they obsessed over one metric: how quickly they could move from hiring clinicians to having them see their first patient.

The hurdle was verifying clinicians’ credentials. “It routinely took months, not because the work was overly complex, but it was very error-prone, manual, and handled by armies of people,” says Krishnamurthy. “And so this ultimately leads to tons and tons of costly delays.”

They soon realized they weren’t the only ones experiencing this. The problem was decades old and affected much of the healthcare industry.

After Dawn Health was acquired in late 2023, the pair founded Assured the following year to build the AI-powered credentialing infrastructure they had always wished for and finally cut that metric down.

“We really think that by leading with technology, we can actually solve these problems at the source and deliver differentiated outcomes.”

Less than two years later, Assured has raised a $6M seed round, is processing tens of thousands of provider enrollments, and is growing 30% month over month.

The back office crisis in healthcare

Most people outside healthcare don’t think much about provider credentialing, which is the process of verifying a clinician’s credentials, getting them licensed, and enrolling them with insurance payers. But for healthcare organizations, it’s one of the biggest bottlenecks in scaling. And it causes many challenges downstream.

It can take between 60 and 90 days of manual work to verify one clinician. State medical boards need to verify education and training. Employers have to confirm employment history. Each state has different licensing requirements. And every insurance payer has unique credentialing forms and enrollment processes.

While this process is crawling along, clinicians can sit idle, healthcare organizations lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per provider, and patients can face months-long waits for care.

“The reason why these processes in healthcare are so slow is that the healthcare back office runs on tons and tons of disconnected systems [and] repetitive manual work,” says Krishnamurthy. “The world of the healthcare back office is filled with parsing of data, filling out forms, sending emails, [and] making phone calls.”

Assured uses AI to automate all of these processes, helping healthcare companies scale their provider network and helping providers see patients faster.

AI credentialing for providers

The platform uses machine learning for data cleanup and mapping, and models fine-tuned to run healthcare credentialing workflows. Its Agents can navigate web portals, adapt to changing state board requirements, verify credentials across more than 2,000 primary sources in parallel, and orchestrate multi-step processes spanning weeks across dozens of concurrent applications.

It means that Assured can fully credential a provider in two business days, compared to the typical timeframe of two to four months, and, on the payer enrollment front, get most providers in-network 15 days faster.

“Our customers, they care about very specific things,” says Krishnamurthy. “[T]hey care about how quickly they can get their providers ready to see patients. And so we tell them, ‘You know what? If you adopt our solution, you will be able to have your providers ready to see patients meaningfully faster than any other solution out there.’”

Assured already works with more than 100 customers, including digital health companies like Blossom Health and Tono Health.

Owning the whole workflow

However, for Krishnamurthy, the opportunity extends beyond credentialing. “We think of successful AI-driven products in healthcare as ones that do not just handle specific tasks but actually own entire workflows,” he says.

“It’s not enough for our solution to exist in its own silo. We must deeply integrate with our customers’ workflows to make a meaningful impact.”

Licensing depends on primary source verification, which depends on gathering the right documentation, which needs to be formatted differently for each payer. Assured handles these interdependencies, connecting to Salesforce and customers’ existing electronic medical records and applicant tracking systems.

The platform can track license expirations, automate state-by-state applications and renewals, manage payer-specific requirements, and maintain audit-ready documentation, while providing real-time visibility into where each provider sits in the pipeline.

“[W]e are really building an orchestration system here that can handle end-to-end workflows instead of just one single task…There are always inputs and outputs that need to be handled at the same time. And so for us to truly have a differentiated and meaningful solution in this space, we need to solve multiple problems at once,” Krishnamurthy explains.

Aiming to make healthcare infrastructure invisible

Right now, Assured has humans in the loop, checking that the data is correct and monitoring the output of the Agents. But the long-term vision is fully autonomous Agents, while keeping quality high.

“Especially in healthcare, it’s not just speed that really matters; it’s reliability as well,” says Krishnamurthy. “[I]t’s incredibly important, especially as we build solutions that scale with technology and not people, to ensure that the technology we’re building is maintaining the highest level of accuracy possible.”

Krishnamurthy and Shivkumar imagine a future where requesting a new license, enrollment, or credentialing packet is as easy as ordering on Amazon. It is a world where provider operations are largely invisible, where the limit to the growth of healthcare is patient demand, not paperwork.

“[W]e really believe that no matter how much clinical innovation occurs, access to quality care cannot scale without solving operational workflows,” says Krishnamurthy. “We are deeply focused on that and…see a massive opportunity.”

*Note: Insight Partners has invested in Assured.