Understood Care, a NYC-based provider of an AI-native patient advocacy platform, has raised $8.4 million in a seed round.
The raise followed a $5M seed funding led by Rethink Education and Zeal Capital Partners, and $3.4M in pre-seed funding led by 1984 Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator.
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The company plans to use the funds to accelerate development of Ava, its AI co-pilot, and to strengthen partnerships with providers, payers, and community organizations.
Understood Care’s advocates act as personal healthcare guides for Medicare patients. They come from fields like nursing, healthcare administration, and social work, and have a strong understanding of the U.S. healthcare system and a passion for helping people.
Even though they work remotely, they build close, ongoing relationships with patients and stay involved until issues are resolved. Patients connect with their advocate via video, phone, or text, working with someone who understands their situation and truly wants to help.
Patients don’t see Ava, Understood Care’s AI co-pilot, working in the background. It helps advocates be more effective, reduces their workload, and gives them more time to support patients emotionally. Ava handles routine and error-prone administrative tasks, such as:
- Making phone calls and waiting on hold
- Summarizing medical records and call notes
- Writing emails, texts, and faxes
- Suggesting helpful resources based on similar cases
- Searching the web when internal information isn’t enough
- Creating Medicare-compliant documents for claims submission
Understood Care is an AI-powered patient advocacy platform that combines human support with automation. It helps patients book appointments, find resources, complete applications, manage their Care, and overcome barriers to the services they need. Using new CMS payment options introduced in 2024, most patients can access these services through their benefits, so most pay nothing out of pocket.
As payers and providers seek simple, reliable solutions that improve patient satisfaction and reduce costs, Understood Care offers a scalable, compliant option that does both. It helps patients attend appointments, use their benefits correctly and address issues such as transportation, housing, and medication costs. This lowers overall care costs while building stronger patient engagement and trust.
Every interaction on Understood Care’s platform adds to a growing dataset of calls, transcripts, documents, workflows, resource suggestions, and outcomes. This data is organized around the real tasks involved in patient advocacy. As Ava learns from each interaction, the platform becomes smarter, faster, and more effective, improving support quality and helping deliver personalized care at scale.
As older adults and people with disabilities in the U.S. face a more complex healthcare system—with more plan choices, frequent policy changes, disconnected providers, and heavy paperwork—managing the non-medical side of care has become confusing and time-consuming. For the more than 60 million adults over 65, a number expected to reach 80 million by 2030, navigating care without support is often very difficult.
Since launching patient care in March 2025, Understood Care has grown quickly, expanding across all 50 states in just eight months. It already supports thousands of patients, with patients reaching out to advocates about five times per month and advocates proactively contacting patients around 11 times per month. The company has credentialed providers nationwide and built relationships with three of the largest Medicare Advantage plans, putting it in a strong position to reach most eligible patients and support more than 10,000 new patients in 2026.
“Navigating today’s healthcare system is one of the biggest and most overlooked challenges for older adults and their caregivers,” said Emily Zhen, Principal at Zeal Capital Partners. “Understood Care’s AI-driven platform creates new ways to build care advocacy into healthcare workflows and expand support across a growing network of advocates. We believe this team is well-positioned to improve how aging populations access and experience care.”
“Understood Care is raising the bar for what AI-powered advocacy can do in healthcare,” said Bridget Duru, Vice President at Rethink Education. “The founding team brings strong healthcare experience and top engineering talent to build the AI and data systems needed to make patient advocacy as common as telehealth, while still keeping the human connection patients need most.”
“I’ve seen the need for patient advocacy firsthand as an ER doctor,” said Farzad Soleimani, MD, Healthcare Partner at 1984 Ventures. “Understood Care is addressing a large, underserved market with an AI-driven solution that truly helps people when they need it most. It’s rare to see an opportunity that combines strong talent, big business potential, and real social impact.”
“As a healthcare operator, I’ve seen too many patients held back by paperwork and unable to get the care they need. This shows the need for a new kind of system. Current solutions aren’t built for the scale, complexity, or level of personalization patients need today,” said Sam Wu, co-founder and CEO of Understood Care. “We built both the technology and payment model to provide affordable, personalized patient advocacy at scale, offering human support, practical help and clarity in a system that often lacks all three.”
About Understood Care
Founded in 2025, by Sam Wu and Kevin Bailey, Understood Care is an AI-powered patient advocacy platform that helps Medicare patients navigate the healthcare system. It combines human advocates with automation to assist with appointments, resources, applications and care coordination. The company serves patients in all 50 states, bills through CMS-approved codes, and is building data and AI tools to make patient advocacy widely accessible.
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