Healthcare Startup Coral Raises $12.5M in Funding

NEW YORK—New York-based Coral, which is building a healthcare platform for specialty providers, has raised $12.5 million in funding led by Menlo Park, California’s Lightspeed and India’s Z47, as the company seeks to add engineering talent and industry experts experienced in healthcare operations and building.

Coral was founded in 2024 by the duo of Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty who met at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India. The two later worked together at LimeChat, an AI-driven support for e-commerce brands, to build automation tools for enterprises. They went on to build Coral after reconnecting in late 2023, leveraging Shrihari’s background in robotics and AI research, and Mohanty’s medical image processing experience.

Inspiration for the startup came when Shrihari’s family member faced a medical emergency and was overwhelmed by the United States’s healthcare system’s administrative burden that involved weeks of paperwork, approvals and referrals stalled in fax queues.

Coral automates healthcare’s administrative work by combining intelligent document processing, agentic workflows and voice automation. The company integrates with existing electronic health record (EHR) systems, fax lines and payer portals to automate administrative workflows, reduce human error and accelerate care delivery.

“Every person in the healthcare system is being slowed down by the same thing: administrative work that was never built to scale,” said Shrihari. “The coordinator chasing faxes. The patient waiting on a referral. The clinician buried in prior authorizations.”

The company began by serving durable medical equipment providers, addressing the administrative bottleneck and handling the authorization and intake workflows for infusion patients. The company said Coral has reached millions in revenue and is expanding into radiology and additional specialty categories.

Coral is also developing an AI-driven co-pilot layer designed to turn operational data into actionable insights for healthcare providers by identifying patterns such as high-denial-rate payers, common rejection reasons and bottlenecks in authorization workflows. The company analyzes referral conversations and claim rejections to offer guidance on improving resubmissions and pinpointing operational delays.

“Their product is already being used by some of the largest customers in the U.S. to dramatically reduce patient intake times and first-pass denials,” said Lightspeed’s Rohil Bagga.