A new health-tech spinout from Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (AI2) aims to reimagine how doctor’s offices and insurance companies communicate with each other, using artificial intelligence to deal with time-consuming phone calls.
MajorBoost was founded by three tech veterans, including CEO Lekshmi Venu, who has been an entrepreneur in residence at AI2 since January 2020. Venu previously spent six years at Amazon, where she led machine learning for Amazon Payments. She helped start MajorBoost last September.
“Instead of spending more time on patient conversations and conducting health care follow-ups, medical providers are spending endless hours on the phone navigating the maze of health insurance call centers,” Venu said in a news release. “MajorBoost empowers providers to get their questions answered quickly, resolve insurance issues faster, and ultimately grow their patient service and human connection.”
The startup says antiquated processes and inefficiencies in the insurance system cost medical providers $35 billion a year as they’re tied up trying to complete tasks such as confirm patient eligibility, claim status and more.
“Our AI-enabled phone automation delivers productivity, intelligence and decision support to healthcare teams, getting [providers] off the phone and back to helping patients,” co-founder and CTO Ben Hesketh said.
Hesketh previously spent time at Microsoft where he worked on such things as HoloLens and established more than 15 patents at the software giant. The third co-founder, VP of engineering Andrew Palmer, was previously a software developer at Microsoft, Moz and Rover.
MajorBoost received $350,000 in pre-seed funding from AI2 and is on the verge of raising a seed round. According to AI2, the startup has several customers in private beta and dozens more on a waitlist. The company is hiring for several roles.
AI2, a creation of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, uses its incubator to pair entrepreneurs with highly-technical co-founders to build AI startups and last year announced a $10 million fund to fuel future spinouts.
