Anterior spends $40 million to speed up approval of artificial intelligence care
New York-based startup Anterior raised $40 million this week to solve one of the most hated pain points in healthcare: administrative clinical work within health plans, specifically prior authorizations.
This round brings the company’s total funding since its founding in 2023 to $64 million. Investors include Sequoia Capital, NEA, FPV and Kinnevik.
For decades, patients have been accustomed to a system where they have to wait days or weeks to get approval for care, which increases costs, degrades the patient experience and exacerbates the clinical burnout crisis. Anterior CEO Abdel Mahmoud said clinicians and payers often spend hours navigating the approval process, but large language models, if designed responsibly and overseen by clinicians, can automate about 90% of the administrative work.
“Clinicians become overseers of the AI rather than processors of paperwork,” he said.
He noted that general-purpose large language models can support some health planning tasks but lack the accuracy and integration needed for daily use in healthcare. Anterior is focused on adapting AI to payer workflows and adding oversight and control so it can be used in day-to-day operations.
Mahmoud explained that at its core, the startup is focused on the “last mile” of making large language models available for healthcare – solving accuracy, security, integration and auditability issues. He believes that AI sometimes fails for payers not because of the model, but because of the implementation. Anterior enables engineers and clinicians to work directly with customers to tailor the technology to existing workflows, test its output and help staff use it in practice.
The platform also offers modular operations, such as reading faxes, interpreting medical records against guidelines, and converting policy PDFs into decision logic, that health plans can combine to automate employee workflows at scale.
“At our core we are a clinical AI inference platform,” Mahmoud said.
Anterior charges its health plan customers based on the value its technology creates, so pricing varies by use case and can also include task-based fees, such as prior authorization based on automated approvals.
In the startup's deployment with Geisinger Health Plan, Mahmoud said its system approved cancer care for patients in about 155 seconds, compared with the weeks it previously took.
“This means cancer patients can get approval for their treatment while sitting in the consultation room,” he declared.
Not only does this speed up decision-making, but it also reduces costs by reducing administrative effort and employee time spent on approvals.
Mahmoud divides Anterior's competitors into two categories. The first is point solutions for specific health plan workflows.
“We have a lot of respect for what they do. We may intersect on some workflows, but Anterior is building something broader: a clinical AI brain that can work across the entire health plan workflow, from prior authorization to care management to payment integrity to risk adjustment,” he explained.
The second category is large technology companies. Mahmoud said Anterior's relationships with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are more of a “competition” than competition, as he views them as potential partners.
Going forward, Mahmoud said the new funding will be used to expand Anterior's health plan deployments, build more integrations and expand the team that works with customers to implement the technology.
Photo: Sakchai Vongsasipat, Getty Images
