Sage Care Wants to Solve Healthcare’s Routing Problem

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.