When his newborn daughter was hospitalized three times for jaundice, Justin Ho found himself on the phone with multiple specialists, struggling to schedule follow-up appointments. The experience revealed what he saw as a basic flaw in the U.S. healthcare system: connecting patients to the right provider remains cumbersome and inconsistent. A year later, Ho co-founded Sage Care, a Palo Alto-based startup using artificial intelligence to coordinate patient access and reduce the administrative load on healthcare staff.
Sage Care announced a $20 million funding round this week led by Yosemite, with participation from General Catalyst, Metrodora (Chelsea Clinton), OVTR.VC, SV Angel, Liquid 2, Seven Stars, Refract Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, and Apollo Ohno. The financing will support product expansion and new deployments with regional and national health systems.
Building a Coordinated System
Ho, a former leader in Uber’s self-driving and mapping division and co-founder of rideOS, launched Sage Care in 2024 with Chris Blumenberg, an early Apple engineer who helped develop the iPhone and Apple Maps, and Dr. Caesar Djavaherian, co-founder of Carbon Health. The team designed Sage’s platform to automate what they describe as “care navigation”: the processes of routing patients, scheduling appointments, managing referrals, and verifying insurance.
The company’s platform combines medically informed AI agents with predictive optimization tools that integrate directly into existing hospital systems. Those agents can answer patient calls, triage symptoms, schedule appointments, and coordinate follow-ups for diagnostics and medications. They can be trained with a health system’s internal data, workflows, and standard operating procedures within 48 hours, according to the company.
Sage Care says its early deployments have helped customers improve efficiency and revenue by 15% to 20%. The company attributes those gains to fewer no-shows, reduced wait times, and improved alignment between provider capacity and patient demand. “Why is there so much waste and capacity when there are patients waiting for months to be seen? It’s a massive problem for the health system,” said Djavaherian, Sage’s chief medical officer.
Administrative waste accounts for as much as 30% of U.S. healthcare spending, according to research published in Health Affairs. Missed appointments and scheduling mismatches contribute to that loss, leaving clinics underutilized while patients face long waits. Sage’s founders see an opportunity to recapture some of that value through automation that prioritizes clinical appropriateness alongside logistics.
Hospitals Test Sage Care’s Navigation System
Sage Care’s early clients include Jiva Health in California, Bronson Healthcare in Michigan, and White Plains Hospital in New York. At Bronson, the company’s platform is being piloted as a care navigation operating system. “The way healthcare is designed today for a patient to obtain access to the right care at the right time is inefficient for healthcare providers and often results in suboptimal patient experience,” said Dr. Ash Goel, senior vice president and chief information officer at Bronson Healthcare. “The care navigation operating system, Sage, addresses these complexities and can help us streamline the journey to offer more accessible care to our patients.”
Investor interest in Sage Care is a toward operational AI in healthcare. “Sage Care has the unique vision to not only replace legacy IT systems with AI, but to totally reinvent the front office of healthcare around this technology,” said Matt Bettonville, investor at Yosemite.
The company is one of several startups using conversational AI to handle patient interactions, a space that includes firms like Assort Health and Hello Patient. Those companies automate call center functions and appointment reminders, but Sage Care emphasizes its clinically informed approach, its agents are trained to consider symptoms, urgency, and provider specialization when routing cases.
Sage Care was founded with a mix of clinical and engineering expertise uncommon among early-stage healthtech startups. Djavaherian brings a background in emergency medicine and health system operations, while Ho and Blumenberg’s prior work on mapping and dispatch algorithms informs Sage’s approach to hospital resource management.
The company’s new funding, which brings its valuation to roughly $90 million according to multiple reports, will be used to expand engineering and customer implementation teams. It expects to generate about $5 million in revenue in 2026, with a focus on larger health systems and multi-specialty networks.
Sage Care’s model depends on proving that automation can meaningfully reduce bottlenecks in real-world operations. For hospitals, the technology promises more consistent patient access and improved staff productivity.
“Our team could solve what is essentially a navigation issue,” Ho said in the company’s launch statement. “We’re bringing our technical expertise in routing, automation, and complex AI systems to healthcare with the hopes of helping as many people as possible get the care that they deserve.”
