Anterior, a company that uses AI to speed up health insurance approvals for medical procedures, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by NEA at a post-money valuation of $95 million, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior's $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, the accelerator that helped the company launch in summer 2022, also participated in the Series A funding.
The round also included a number of angel investors, including Mustafa Suleiman, the co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI who was hired by Microsoft in March to lead the company's consumer AI division.
NEA and Anterior did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Anterior, formerly known as Co:helm, was co-founded by Abdel Mahmoud, a former physician who, frustrated with the amount of time spent on administrative tasks rather than his patience, left the medical profession to get a master's degree in computer science and embark on a career in tech.
The company developed an LLM-powered co-pilot that can save nurses and doctors time spent gathering medical documentation required by insurance. Anterior's solution aims to reduce denial rates and speed up patient access to care.
Anterior's initial service will be prior authorization automation, but the company plans to eventually expand into other medical management functions.
Mohammad Mahzoumi, managing general partner of NEA's healthcare team and co-CEO of the firm, has joined Anteria's board of directors. Mahzoumi's investments include Tempus, a genomic testing and data analytics company founded by Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky, which is set to IPO next week at a market cap of $6.1 billion. Mahzoumi is also an investor in Zaira, an AI drug discovery startup that was founded this year after raising $1 billion in funding.
Anterior competes with Cohere Health, another provider of prior authorization automation. The company raised $50 million in February led by Deerfield Management with participation from Define Ventures, Flare Capital Partners, Longitude Capital and Polaris Partners, bringing the five-year-old company's total funding to $106 million.
