Baba secures US$40m to expand AI-powered healthcare navigation

Baba has raised US$40m in Series A funding to expand its clinical care teams, AI research and health plan partnerships for Medicare and Medicaid patients.

The New York-based health tech company develops AI-assisted tools to help older adults and families coordinate medical care, insurance benefits and other healthcare needs.

The company says it has worked with more than 10,000 patients and families and has a waiting list of more than 100,000 people.

Founded a year ago by Connor Sweeney, who studied biological engineering and computer science at MIT, Baba aims to simplify care coordination across doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and health insurers.

Baba says Medicare patients now see more specialists on average than they did two decades ago, making it harder to manage their care.

Its approach combines healthcare providers, care coordinators, licensed therapists and AI to support patients with medical, financial, social and behavioural health needs.

Sweeney, founder and chief executive of Baba, said: “We bring together providers, care coordinators, licensed therapists and AI, supporting people across their medical, financial, social and behavioural health needs.

“Causal, dollar-denominated care navigation has been a holy grail in healthcare for a long time, and it’s finally possible because of AI.”

The company is also developing BabaBench, a benchmark designed to assess how AI systems handle extended patient advocacy tasks, including paperwork, calls to insurers and medical billing follow-up.

Baba said the benchmark has been submitted as a preprint to arXiv, a platform for sharing research before formal publication, and accepted to an upcoming NeurIPS workshop.

The work aims to evaluate how AI systems perform on administrative and care coordination tasks involving multiple steps and interactions.

Baba has also been building partnerships with health plans, academic institutions, non-profit organisations and government agencies.

These include partnerships with the American Stroke Foundation and the American Breast Cancer Foundation.

In June, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services selected Baba to participate in the ACCESS Model, a 10-year programme testing technology-supported chronic care across four clinical tracks.

The Series A round was led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from CVS Health Ventures and Valtrius.