Phare Health Raises $3.1 Million to Expand Financial Operating System

Phare Health raised 2.5 million pounds (about $3.1 million) in a seed round to expand its artificial intelligence-native financial operating system for healthcare organizations.

The London-based startup is focusing first on solving the pain points around medical coding, according to a Wednesday (Nov. 22) post on LinkedIn by venture capital firm General Catalyst, which led the seed round.

“We believe Phare illuminates the path toward revenue intelligence that will unlock Health Assurance,” General Catalyst said in the post.

Phare Health aims to use AI to streamline administrative processes and give healthcare systems more transparency into their own data, Phare Health Co-founder Martin Seneviratne said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn.

“We all get excited about AI for clinicians, but there is a much more urgent need for AI in the hospital back-office — tackling the iceberg of admin processes under the surface,” Seneviratne said in the post.

In addition to working to solve the medical coding pain point, Phare Health is focusing on enabling “next-generation” revenue cycle management and, over time, modernizing the entire financial infrastructure of health systems, General Catalyst said in a Wednesday blog post.

With these capabilities, Phare Health plans to build that infrastructure to become “a real-time, action-oriented intelligence engine that can surface opportunities to improve financial performance,” the post said.

“From there, the company intends to integrate a number of adjacent financial products to create an ecosystem of solutions that will help deliver financial resilience for health systems,” per the post.

Phare Health is building this solution at a time when Europe’s healthcare systems are facing multiple crises, according to the blog post.

“Two out of three European hospitals are at a financial breaking point, and while industry leaders are engaging in yet another short-term cost-cutting exercise, they likely cannot ‘squeeze the lemon’ much longer,” the post said.

PYMNTS Intelligence found that the number of healthcare payors and insurers that are using AI for payment-related purposes has increased three-fold since 2019.

About 12% of these organizations are doing so now, and close to three-quarters of executives plan to invest in AI over the next three years, according to “AI in Focus: The Healthcare Technology Roadmap,” a PYMNTS and Brighterion collaboration.

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