Baba Raises $40M From FirstMark, CVS for Medicare AI Care
TL;DR
- Baba closed a $40M Series A led by FirstMark Capital with CVS Health Ventures, Valtruis, General Catalyst, Genius Ventures and Ground Up Ventures.
- The startup serves more than 10,000 Medicare and Medicaid patients and families and has a waitlist above 100,000, pairing care coordinators and licensed therapists with AI agents.
- CMS selected Baba for the 10-year ACCESS Model across all four tracks, and its BabaBench benchmark for long-horizon patient advocacy was accepted to a NeurIPS workshop.
Baba, a healthcare navigation startup building AI agents for Medicare and Medicaid members, raised a $40 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital, Fierce Healthcare reported. CVS Health Ventures and value-based specialist Valtruis joined, with returning investors General Catalyst, Genius Ventures and Ground Up Ventures.
The company says it serves more than 10,000 patients and families and has over 100,000 families on a waiting list. Each member gets a dedicated care team of coordinators and licensed therapists, with AI agents handling paperwork, insurer calls and billing follow-up.
"By dramatically lowering the cost of operating and coordinating care, we have an opportunity to make care delivery economically viable for populations that have historically been too expensive to serve," said founder and CEO Connor Sweeney.
The investor framing treats this as infrastructure rather than another assistant. "Baba is our latest bet on the consumerization of healthcare, this time for millions of Americans who are rural, older and have more complex needs," said Rick Heitzmann, co-founder and partner at FirstMark Capital. Carter Prince of CVS Health Ventures was flatter: "Navigating healthcare is not a challenge that can be solved by general AI agents."
Baba also published BabaBench, a benchmark for how well frontier agents handle long-horizon patient advocacy: multi-week insurance calls, billing appeals and prior-authorization disputes. The work was accepted to a NeurIPS workshop.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services selected Baba for the ACCESS Model, a 10-year program for technology-supported chronic care. The company qualified across all four tracks: early cardio-kidney-metabolic, advanced cardio-kidney-metabolic, musculoskeletal, and behavioral health. New hires include Alicia Tennenbaum, LCSW, formerly of Mount Sinai, as executive director of clinical operations, and designer Alan Li from Ramp.
It lands in a crowded week for healthcare AI rounds on our tracker.
Originally reported by fiercehealthcare.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Medicare-Focused Care Navigation Startup Baba Raises $40M Series A From FirstMark and CVS Health Ventures