The Medicaid world needs @hifortunahealth more than ever: because of the relentless pace of federal and state Medicaid policy changes over the last few years, Medicaid eligibility is getting way more complex. A lot of the chatter has been focused on reduced eligibility, but there's an equally important challenge associated with those who are eligible but lose out on coverage because of administrative process complexity - in the U.S., losing health coverage can boil down to something as simple (and unfortunate) as missing a letter in the mail. Fortuna is fixing this. The company launched in the throes of redeterminations to make Medicaid eligibility determination and enrollment clear, navigable, and reliable. We couldn't be more excited to lead Fortuna's Series A (after also leading the Seed) and continue backing this incredible, run-through-walls team - @singareddynm, Cydney Kim, and @ben_wesner - as they build clearinghouse infrastructure and consumer co-pilots for Medicaid – and beyond. More here: @daisydwolf @a16z @a16zBioHealth

Fortuna Health has raised an $18M Series A from @a16z to double down on modernizing Medicaid. 2.5 years ago, we set out with the lofty goal to build the TurboTax for Medicaid and government coverage. Sounds easy… until you’re learning the eligibility, deadline, and documentation requirements across 56 states and territories managed on outdated infrastructure with inconsistent workflows. Our team has *always* believed navigating Medicaid should feel like a modern consumer experience. Simple. Accurate. Efficient. So we built a product to reduce burden, from automating away income errors to removing duplicate enrollments. We unified and routed submissions across channels (email, fax, phone, snail mail, portals, etc), so complex legacy infrastructure never stood in the way. We simplified and personalized support for the moments that matter - like renewing with a newborn. With the One Big Beautiful Bill's changes coming fast, we're doubling down on putting the Medicaid consumer first with better automation and infrastructure. And we're stepping up to support states and merit workers making technology and operational transitions. A huge thanks to @julesyoo and @daisydwolf (a16z HC+Bio) and @garrytan (Y Combinator) for believing in our vision. To all of our customers - and every consumer on Fortuna - we're honored to serve as your trusted Medicaid navigation partner. To the incredible Fortuna team that's built boldly and never looked back... this is our time! 🚀  Read more on our Series A here: If you're wired to solve big problems, we're also hiring (!!!) across engineering, operations, and growth:

And we’re seeing this in recent organic growth / adoption rates, esp in provider facing tech:

The exact phenomenon I described below at the @hr_transform Conference is manifesting in the form of @thatch_ai’s Marketplace, which was announced today; as consumers have become a "new class of payor" (we spend a collective ~$500B / yr out of pocket on healthcare products and services), the supply side needed to catch up by packaging products and services in such a way that were not just optimized for insurance rails, but purpose-built for consumer shopping and cash pay, like those featured in said marketplace. Congrats to Chris Ellis, Adam Stevenson and the rest of Team Thatch on this exciting launch (and @function and @TrueMedPayments for being early participants)!

A clinical co-pilot, an administrative co-pilot, and an autonomous clinical agent meet in a bar... actually, they met on stage at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Leadership Conference (@ShivdevRao of @AbridgeHQ, Joan Butters of @Xsolis_Health, @munjalshah of @hippocraticai), to talk about: 🔵 what's been good/bad for their business about the high speed, nearly daily evolution of foundation models in the last couple of years (good = continuous product performance improvements/capabilities; bad = increased noise from so many "basic wrapper" entrants because the barrier to building a live (seemingly) working AI product has gone way down) 🔵 whether it's getting cheaper or more expensive to build AI products/companies (getting cheaper on the model side, but specialized talent and distribution have always been, and continue to be, expensive) 🔵 a reality check on the AI job displacement trope (not really a thing in an industry where job reqs sit open/unfilled for months because of the labor shortage) 🔵 how the EHR platforms are responding amidst all of this (seem to be playing nice so far...) 🔵 how AI apps companies should all be grateful to the AI scribe players for greasing the wheels of the buyers - "those AI scribes are working really well, let's do more AI stuff!" The app layer continues to be where value is most rapidly accruing, especially in healthcare domains where specialized, enterprise grade models are required for high-stakes use cases. And the rate of organic, market-driven adoption continues to grow at unprecedented levels (and, as I wrote about recently, without any government mandates or artificial incentives or pandemics!). Thanks to the @jpmorgan healthcare team for hosting.

Yes, we planned the publication of our podcast with @HeyEpic's SVP of R&D, @sethHain, to occur exactly 5 days before @AcquiredFM's piece on Epic. Definitely listen to both. Ours is much shorter. @a16zBioHealth

psyched. welcome @eriktorenberg !

ICYMI: the @a16z team's Big Ideas series is back for 2025 - this time, chock full of 50 great predictions from our whole squad. In @a16zBioHealth specifically: 🤯I talked about how AI-powered "Super Staffing" will help us solve the mother of all staffing crises that healthcare has been dealing with for the last few years 🤯 @vijaypande described how personalized, longitudinal, and proactive healthcare is finally within reach given our current AI-powered measurement and interpretation capabilities 🤯 @vintweeta described how Big is Back in Biotech - after an era of focus on rare diseases, we expect a swing back towards developing therapies to address bigger ticket, common disease areas 🤯And @JorgeCondeBio talked about avocados🥑... in the context of drug targets.