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Exclusive: Assort Health raises $76 million Series B to build on voice AI healthcare platform

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4 months ago

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Like so many people with busy 9-to-5s, high school teacher Suzanne Grinberg has a scheduling problem: By the time she has a free moment in her day to call her doctor to make an appointment, the doctor’s office is already closed. 

So, when she recently called her dermatologist before business hours, Grinberg expected to leave a voicemail—but instead got a pleasant surprise. “At 5:30 AM, when I was putting on my makeup to go to work, I was able to make my appointment,” she said.

Grinberg’s dermatologist had started using a voice AI system called Assort Health, a startup building specialty-specific agents for healthcare. The company was founded in 2023 by Jeff Liu and Jon Wang, who together spent two years getting to know the healthcare system before the startup picked up steam. 

“What’s really interesting about our space is that voice AI and LLMs have actually been around for a while,” said Liu, who is the co-CEO. “But healthcare is so complicated. They have binders, spreadsheets full of these really complicated rules, and that’s prevented automation from helping providers—despite them really needing help.” 

Assort, which to date has collected approximately 42 million patient interactions on its platform, raised its $22 million Series A in April, with Term Sheet breaking the news. They’re now back, just a few months later: Assort has raised a $76 million Series B, led by Lightspeed, Fortune can exclusively report. First Round and Chemistry, which led the Series A, returned as investors for this round and were joined by Felicis, A*, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Quiet. This brings Assort’s total capital raised to date to $102 million, and to one doctor, the tech solves a key business problem. 

“The problem in any business, if you don’t have individuals working at the top of their license, is that you’re leaving money on the table,” said Dr. Titus Abraham, physician at Annapolis Internal Medicine, a practice using Assort. “They’re doing things that can be done better by someone else or by a different system…I shouldn’t be signing paperwork or taking calls all day.”

The end game, says cofounder and co-CEO Wang, is “moving from a reactive system where you as a patient have to schedule a primary care appointment six months out, to a system that’s more proactive and preventative.” For example, Wang says, “if you know after you get your cortisone injection in your right knee, you need to schedule another appointment three months out, we’re going to have an agent that’s going to be there for you, helping make sure you get your time booked right.”

It’s a lofty goal, to be sure, and not one any single company can accomplish in a system as labyrinthine and layered as U.S. healthcare. All the same, this is a moment characterized by a unique level of optimism (and venture dollars) flowing into a wave of young startups at the intersection of healthcare and AI. Lightspeed partner Galym Imanbayev attributes this momentum to “the surface area by which technology and AI can impact healthcare [having] dramatically expanded…leading to unprecedented ROI demonstrated tangibly by customers.” Olympic gold medal speedskater and Assort investor Apolo Ohno puts it more directly: “The radical speed at which AI is transforming industries right now is not debatable.”

For Assort’s Liu, the ultimate value is in the patient experience: “It’s a painful process to get access to care. And when we solve this critical problem in a way patients and providers haven’t seen before, it’s this magical moment.”

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Venture Deals

– Alvys, a Solana Beach, Calif.-based developer of AI technology for freight operations, raised $40 million in Series B funding. RTP Global led the round and was joined by Alpha Square Group and others.

– OXCCU, an Oxford, U.K.-based sustainable aviation fuel company, raised $28 million in Series B funding from International Airlines Group, Safran Corporate Ventures, Orlen, Aramco Ventures, and others.

– Paid, a London, U.K.-based monetization and cost tracking platform for AI agents, raised $21.6 million in seed funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round and was joined by FUSE and existing investor EQT Ventures.

– Lexroom.ai, a Milan, Italy-based developer of legal AI software, raised $19 million in Series A funding. Base10 Partners led the round.

– Mondoo, a San Francisco-based developer of a vulnerability management platform for agentic AI, raised $17.5 million in funding. HV Capital led the round and was joined by T.Capital and existing investors Atomico, Firstminute Capital, and System.One.

– Goodfit, a London, U.K.-based data platform for go-to-market strategy, raised $13 million in funding. Notion Capital led the round and was joined by Salica Investments, Inovia Capital, Robin Capital, Common Magic, and Andrena Ventures.

– Neura Health, a NYC-based virtual neurology clinic, raised $11.4 million in Series A funding. The American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women Venture Fund led the round and was joined by Norwest Venture Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Esplanade Ventures, and others.

– Confido Health, a New York City-based agentic AI platform for health care operations, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Blume Ventures led the round and was joined by Schema Ventures, Vicus Ventures, and others.

– InOrbit.AI, a Mountain View, Calif.-based AI-powered robot orchestration platform, raised $10 million. L’ATTITUDE Ventures and Globant Ventures led the round.

– Supernova, a Dover, Del.-based developer of an AI-powered collaborative workspace for product teams, raised $9.2 million in Series A funding. Taiwania Capital led the round and was joined by J&T Ventures, Reflex Capital, and existing investors.

– Arqh, a Zurich, Switzerland-based AI company developing a decision-intelligence engine for complex operations, raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding. Founderful led the round and was joined by Merantix Capital.

Private Equity

– AAi Labels & Decals, backed by Portrait Capital, acquired Sticker Ranch, a San Antonio, Texas-based labels and stickers provider. Financial terms were not disclosed.

– Northrim Horizon acquired ACG Systems, an Annapolis, M.D.-based systems integrator and technical service provider for wireless communication systems. Financial terms were not disclosed.

– Towne Park, backed by Greenbriar Equity Group, acquired Frogparking, a Palmerston, New Zealand-based parking systems company. Financial terms were not disclosed. 

Funds + Funds of Funds

– Concept Ventures, a London, U.K.-based venture capital firm, raised $88 million for its second fund focused on pre-seed companies.

People

– GV, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, promoted Vidu Shanmugarajah to general partner.

– Turnspire Capital Partners, a New York City-based private equity firm, promoted Ahdiv Nathan to principal.

Introducing the Fortune AIQ 50 ranking

Today, we published the Fortune AIQ 50, a new ranking that evaluates how Fortune 500 companies are actually deploying AI, and how technology leaders value those investments relative to industry peers. The ranking is a record of how 18 sectors across the Fortune 500, including financials, health care, and retailing, are utilizing AI to personalize customer experiences, provide groundbreaking data analysis, optimize supply chains, and more. Explore the list, and catch up on our ongoing Fortune AIQ series.



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Khosla-backed Formulary raises oversubscribed $4.6 million seed round for its AI-powered private fund manager software

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27 minutes ago

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January 20, 2026

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Alfia Ilicheva came from the world of public markets, including four years at one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater. But when she transitioned over to the private side, including serving as the CEO of an Apollo-backed investment platform, she realized the difficulty of fund administration for operations like private equity and venture capital. Instead of having access to real-time and accurate data like at Bridgewater, which can rely on publicly available information, this new world was filled with manually compiled and fragmented data subject to human error and inconsistent metrics.  “How could it be that hedge funds are so into the future and private capital markets are so backward,” she remembers thinking. 

As private markets explode and AI makes automation increasingly possible, Ilicheva saw an opportunity to build the next generation of fund administration software for everyone from venture capital outfits to PE giants like Apollo. After initially planning to bootstrap the project, which she named Formulary, Ilicheva was introduced to Hari Arul, a partner at Khosla Ventures, who immediately saw the appeal of the idea. Khosla is leading Formulary’s $4.6 million seed round, which Ilicheva says is three times oversubscribed, with participation from Human Ventures, Serena Williams’s venture firm, and others. 

In the red-hot field of private investments, buoyed by the rise of private credit and massively valued companies like SpaceX and OpenAI, fund administration may not be the most alluring area for innovation. But the ability to track investments, returns, and performance—and accurately convey the information to investors, or limited partners—is a necessary foundation. 

The existing options fall into two camps: the service side, or high-touch accounting companies, like SS&C and Citco, or the software side, like Carta. As Ilicheva interviewed general partners and former clients in her user research, she realized that nearly everyone was dissatisfied with the existing options to the point that most turned to shadow fund administration, where they would hire outside firms but keep their own books at the same time. “When you raise a fund, your dream is to generate alpha by investing capital, not redoing someone’s work,” Ilicheva said. 

Ilicheva planned to find a happy medium between the two models by leveraging AI to massively scale up the service approach, creating software for their own in-house accountants, which Ilicheva playfully calls bionic accountants. “They’re really focused on having a grip on the numbers and delivering service, but they’re not manually entering things in an Excel spreadsheet, which has been the industry’s burden for the past decades,” she said.  

The challenge in creating a tech-enabled services company, of course, is scale, with a pure SaaS model able to grow at a much faster clip. When I asked Khosla’s Arul how he thought about the approach, he said the key is to deliver the vast majority of the product through technology: “It’s important for any entrepreneur or any investor to look at an AI-enabled services business and say, the margin of how this business runs looks more like a technology company than a services company.” 

Arul said that while Khosla is not yet using Formulary, which is just now coming out of stealth, he’s optimistic for a future where tedious processes like ensuring data accuracy for LPs can be fully, reliably automated. Ilicheva mentioned one possible future use case for Formulary as drafting LP letters, which Arul wholeheartedly endorsed, along with a portal where investors could communicate directly with the system to understand the value of positions, fund deployment, and future capital calls. “[That] sounds pie in the sky relative to what the reality is today,” Arul said, “But it doesn’t feel out of reach.” 

Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com

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Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Leaders at Davos are obsessing over how to use AI at scale

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3 hours ago

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January 20, 2026

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  • In today’s CEO Daily: Fortune‘s AI editor Jeremy Kahn reports on the AI buzz at Davos
  • The big story: SCOTUS could upend Trump’s leverage to acquire Greenland.
  • The markets: Jolted by Trump’s renewed tariff threats.
  • Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. I’m on the ground in Davos, Switzerland, for this year’s World Economic Forum. As Diane wrote yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump’s arrival later this week along with a large delegation of U.S. officials eclipses pretty much every other discussion at Davos this year. But, when people here aren’t talking about Trump, they are talking about AI.

At Davos last year, the hype around AI agents was pierced by the shock of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which was released during the conference. We’ll see if a similar bit of news upends the AI narrative again this year. (There are rumors that DeepSeek is planning to drop another model.) But, barring that, business leaders seem to be less wowed by the hype around AI this year and more concerned with the nitty-gritty of how to implement the technology successfully at scale.

On Monday, Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce’s chief engineering and customer success officer, told me the company is using ‘forward deployed engineers’ to tighten feedback loops between customers and product teams. Salesforce is also offering pre-built agents, workflows, and playbooks to help customers re-engineer their businesses—and avoid getting stuck in “pilot purgatory.”

Meanwhile, at a side event in Davos called A Compass for Europe, that focused on how to restore the continent’s flagging competitiveness, AI was front-and-center. Christina Kosmowski, the CEO of LogicMonitor, told the assembled CEOs that to achieve AI success at scale, companies should take a “top down” approach, with the CEO and leadership identifying the highest value use cases and driving the whole organization to align around achieving them. Neeti Mehta Shukla, the cofounder and chief impact officer at Automation Anywhere, said it was critical to move beyond measuring automation’s impact only through the lens of labor savings. She gave specific customer examples where uplifting data quality, improving customer satisfaction, or moving more workers to new tasks, were better metrics than simply looking at cost per unit output. Finally, Lila Tretikov, head of AI strategy at NEA, said Europe has enough talent and funding to build world-beating AI companies—what it lacks is ambition and willingness to take big bets.

Later, I met with Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of process analytics software platform Celonis. He echoed some of these points, telling me that to achieve ROI with AI generally required three things: strong leadership commitment, the establishment of a center of excellence within the business (this led to an 8x higher return than for companies that didn’t do this!), and finally having enough live data connected to the AI platform.

For further AI insights from Davos, check out Fortune’s Eye on AI newsletter. Meanwhile, Fortune is hosting a number of events in Davos throughout the week. View that lineup here. And my colleagues will be providing more reporting from Davos to CEO Daily and fortune.com throughout the week.—Jeremy Kahn

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This is the web version of CEO Daily, a newsletter of must-read global insights from CEOs and industry leaders. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.



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Stock market today: Dow futures tumble 400 points on Trump’s tariffs over Greenland, Nobel prize

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13 hours ago

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January 19, 2026

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U.S. stock futures dropped late Monday after global equities sold off as President Donald Trump launches a trade war against NATO allies over his Greenland ambitions.

Futures tied to the Dow Jones industrial average sank 401 points, or 0.81%. S&P 500 futures were down 0.91%, and Nasdaq futures sank 1.13%. 

Markets in the U.S. were closed in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday. Earlier, the dollar dropped as the safe haven status of U.S. assets was in doubt, while stocks in Europe and Asia largely retreated.

On Saturday, Trump said Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland will be hit with a 10% tariff starting on Feb. 1 that will rise to 25% on June 1, until a “Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

The announcement came after those countries sent troops to Greenland last week, ostensibly for training purposes, at the request of Denmark. But late Sunday, a message from Trump to European officials emerged that linked his insistence on taking over Greenland to his failure to be award the Nobel Peace Prize.

The geopolitical impact of Trump’s new tariffs against Europe could jeopardize the trans-Atlantic alliance and threaten Ukraine’s defense against Russia.

But Wall Street analysts were more optimistic on the near-term risk to financial markets, seeing Trump’s move as a negotiating tactic meant to extract concessions.

Michael Brown, senior research strategist at Pepperstone, described the gambit as “escalate to de-escalate” and pointed out that the timing of his tariff announcement ahead of his appearance at the Davos World Economic Forum this week is likely not a coincidence.

“I’ll leave others to question the merits of that approach, and potential longer-run geopolitical fallout from it, but for markets such a scenario likely means some near-term choppiness as headline noise becomes deafening, before a relief rally in due course when another ‘TACO’ moment arrives,” he said in a note on Monday, referring to the “Trump always chickens out” trade.

Similarly, Jonas Goltermann, deputy chief markets economist at Capital Economics, also said “cooler heads will prevail” and downplayed the odds that markets are headed for a repeat of last year’s tariff chaos.

In a note Monday, he said investors have learned to be skeptical about all of Trump’s threats, adding that the U.S. economy remains healthy and markets retain key risk buffers.

“Given their deep economic and financial ties, both the US and Europe have the ability to impose significant pain on each other, but only at great cost to themselves,” Goltermann added. “As such, the more likely outcome, in our view, is that both sides recognize that a major escalation would be a lose-lose proposition, and that compromise eventually prevails. That would be in line with the pattern around most previous Trump-driven diplomatic dramas.”



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