Candid Health cofounder Doug Proctor spun his laptop around to show me a herd of wild horses grazing behind him in upstate New York during our first Zoom call. It was a fitting flex for two guys who built one of healthcare\u2019s hottest infrastructure companies while deliberately staying out of the Bay Area bubble, dressed, as cofounder and CEO Nick Perry put it, in \u201cglasses and black T-shirts.\u201d<\/p>\n
The duo just raised a $120 million Series D, Fortune learned exclusively, led by Sixth Street Growth<\/a>. Existing backers Oak HC\/FT, 8VC and Y Combinator also piled back in. The round triples Candid\u2019s 2025 valuation, and comes as annual recurring revenue grew 190% year over year. It lands roughly 18 months after Candid\u2019s $52.5 million Series C<\/a>, which itself followed a $29 million Series B<\/a> just six months earlier, bringing Candid\u2019s total raised past $219 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n Candid runs the billing operation for doctors so they don\u2019t have to. Every insurer has its own rulebook for how a claim must be filled out, and most providers still rely on billing software built in the early 2000s to navigate over 1,000 different insurers\u2019 rules. When something\u2019s off (like a misplaced comma or wrong code), the claim gets kicked back, and either the patient or the doctor eats the cost. Candid replaces that process with AI agents and a rules engine trained on the submission quirks of more than 1,000 payers, so claims go out correctly the first time.<\/p>\n Perry and Proctor met at Palantir<\/a>, where Perry led healthcare work and Proctor built defense and intelligence systems. Both describe revenue cycle management (RCM), the process by which healthcare providers get paid, as fundamentally the same data integration problem Palantir was built to solve, just applied to medical billing.<\/p>\n Perry says growth has been almost entirely organic. \u201cWe\u2019ve grown by word of mouth,\u201d he told me, noting Candid spent virtually nothing on marketing until now. According to him, the business has grown 6x, then 5x, then 2.5x on a run rate basis in recent years, with net revenue retention close to 200%, meaning existing customers barely churn and simply grow their spend as their own claim volume scales.<\/p>\n Medical billing represents roughly 1% of U.S. GDP, and per federal data<\/a>, U.S. healthcare spending overall runs about 18% of GDP. The country spends $280 billion<\/a> annually on healthcare billing administration nationwide, a figure independently cited across industry coverage of the space. He calls the problem \u201cworthy and wicked\u201d: worthy because it touches nearly every American who\u2019s ever gotten an incorrect medical bill, and wicked because fixing it requires untangling decades of bad incentives baked into how providers get paid.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sixth Street\u2019s Alex Katz says his firm interviewed nearly 40 Candid customers before writing the check, and the feedback was \u201cconsistently off the charts.\u201d Customer proof points back that up: Talkiatry cut manual billing work by 40% and now collects 98.3% of what payers owe, while Nourish grew without adding billing staff and automatically processes 96.7% of its claims.<\/p>\n The real threat to legacy incumbents isn\u2019t just software, it\u2019s economics. Proctor frames Candid\u2019s mission as shrinking the billing industry itself, stripping out the manual, offshore labor that props up older vendors and keeping those savings for the business instead. Perry, for his part, says he\u2019s not fixated on an eventual IPO. \u201cStripe is a very large private company, and they seem great,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n See you tomorrow,<\/p>\n Lily Mae Lazarus Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today\u2019s newsletter. Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n VENTURE DEALS<\/p>\n \u00a0– Augustus<\/a>, a New York City-based developer of an AI- and stablecoin-native clearing bank designed to enable global financial institutions to move money across major currencies in real time, raised $180 million in Series B funding. Tiger Global led the round and was joined by Hummingbird, QED, and others.<\/p>\n – Humanoid<\/a>, a London, U.K.-based developer of humanoid industrial robots, raised $152 million in Series A funding. Prime Movers Lab led the round and was joined by Schae\ufb04er, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and Agla\u00e9 Ventures.<\/p>\n – Gritt<\/a>, a San Francisco-based developer of robotics and AI systems that automate construction and infrastructure work, raised $32.4 million in a $26 million Series A round led by Obvious Ventures and joined by Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investments, following a $6.4 million seed round.<\/p>\n – Bluecore Energy<\/a>, a Long Beach, Calif.-based developer of small modular nuclear reactors for floating barge-based power plants, raised $10 million in funding. Slauson & Co. led the round and was joined by Harlem Capital, Precursor Ventures, LMNT, Visible Hands VC, Karman Ventures, and others.<\/p>\n – ORiS<\/a>, a Torino, Italy-based developer of laser-based wireless power transmission systems designed for space, raised \u20ac5 million ($5.7 million) in pre-seed funding. Earlybird and Pitchdrive led the round and were joined by Galaxia, Vento, and Piemonte Next Fund.<\/p>\n – Vikk AI<\/a>, a Long Beach, Calif.-based developer of an AI-powered legal assistant, raised $4.2 million across pre-seed and seed rounds from individual investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n – Photon Queue<\/a>, a Champaign, Ill.-based developer of free-space quantum memory devices for quantum-computing and networking systems, raised $4 million in seed funding. Playground Global led the round.<\/p>\n – Zeom<\/a>, a London, U.K.-based global wealth infrastructure company, raised $2.7 million in pre-seed funding. Fabric Ventures led the round and was joined by Plug and Play and Tritemius.<\/p>\n PRIVATE EQUITY<\/p>\n – Sila<\/a>, an Alameda, Calif.-based developer of battery materials, raised $300 million in private equity funding. Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures led the investment and were joined by 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, T. Rowe Price Associates, and others.<\/p>\n – Knox Lane acquired Cross Country Healthcare<\/a>, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based health care workforce solutions company. Financial terms were not disclosed.<\/p>\n FUNDS + FUNDS OF FUNDS<\/p>\n – Golden Gate Capital<\/a>, a San Francisco-based private equity firm, raised $1.5 billion for its seventh fund focused on industrials, consumer services, and technology & financial services companies.<\/p>\n
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