Sage Care founders (left to right) Chris Blumenberg, Caesar Djavaherian and Justin Ho
Sage Care
Startup Sage Care is coming out of stealth with $20 million in funding and customers that include Bronson Healthcare and White Plains Hospital.
Justin Ho knows a lot about navigation. He’s quarterbacked Uber’s self-driving and mapping strategy and built dispatch and routing software at rideOS wrangling issues like scheduling, intelligent dispatch and pricing. Now he’s bringing his mapping acumen to bear on a new challenge: making it easier to navigate the rat’s maze that is healthcare appointments. With Chris Blumenberg, coinventor of the iPhone and his cofounder at rideOS, and Dr. Caesar Djavaherian, cofounder of Carbon Health, Ho has launched Sage Care to help patients and healthcare systems deal with navigation mess.
Broadly, healthcare navigation covers all routing, referrals, appointment booking and messaging involved in getting the right patient to the right doctor at the right time. That might sound rudimentary, but it’s not. If you’re discharged from the ER with orders to see a cardiologist in three days but can’t get an appointment for six months, for example, that’s a problem for both you and the health system whose ER you might wind back up in.
“Prior to the advent of Uber, if you wanted transportation you needed to call a central system and they would find the taxi closest to you and assign that one,” Ho, the company’s CEO, told Forbes. “That’s the state of healthcare today.”
Making that system more efficient and saving costs for cash-strapped health systems is where Ho and his cofounders see a significant opportunity. Their Palo Alto, California-based startup, Sage Care, is now emerging from stealth with $20 million in funding at a valuation of some $90 million, including a recent $12 million round led by Reed Jobs’ Yosemite plus previously unannounced seed funding from General Catalyst. The company has already lined up customers that include Jiva Health, a multi-specialty medical clinic in California; Bronson Healthcare, a large health system in Michigan, and White Plains Hospital in New York. It expects a small amount of revenue this year with perhaps $5 million in 2026.
There are lots of startups using AI and technology to address different pieces of healthcare administration, which accounts for an estimated 15% to 30% of all medical spending. Others using AI chatbots to handle calls include Assort Health, which made the cut for this year’s Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list, and Hello Patient. “We looked at a number of companies doing a healthcare voice AI,” said Yosemite’s Matt Bettonville, who leads the firm’s investments in digital health. “A lot of those were saying, ‘We’ll take those legacy robocalls and modernize them with technology.’ This was the first team to come in and say, ‘We will reinvent the whole process.’”
“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.”
Dr. Caesar Djavaherian, cofounder and chief medical officer, Sage Care
Back in January 2024, Ho, 38, and Blumenberg, 47, started quietly discussing what their next entrepreneurial venture might be. They considered an assortment of ideas, among them building humanoid robots to take care of the elderly and making a better clinical search engine. Things moved quickly after they met Djavaherian, 51, an emergency doctor and former chief clinical innovation officer at digital health startup Carbon Health. He joined as cofounder and chief medical officer that August. “As soon as he met us, he had already pattern-matched our backgrounds with how broken care navigation is in healthcare,” Ho said.
Anyone who’s ever struggled to make an appointment with a new doctor or specialist knows how hard it can be to find the right person and get an appointment when wait lists are often filled for months. For hospitals and health systems, the flip side of this is that too many people end up as no-shows or at an appointment with the wrong doctor or without the right prep and have to be rebooked. “There are lots of inefficiencies in the system,” Djavaherian said, ticking off issues like last-minute cancellations that aren’t filled and clinic rooms that sit unused for hours. “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.”
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Djavaherian had been describing this problem for months to the two other founders when Ho experienced the problem first-hand. When his daughter Gracie was born she needed treatment for jaundice, which included being readmitted to the hospital three times for blue light therapy. “We were matched with the wrong specialists and given bad guidance. We had problems finding the right pediatrician and getting on their schedule,” Ho said. “I spent the first three weeks of my paternity leave on the phone.”
Last winter, as they focused on the problem, they started a grand tour of hospitals and health systems across America, asking open-ended questions about how technology might solve their problems. “Our intention was not to start another routing-and-matching company, but after talking to 57 health systems we realized we could help a lot of people if we built an air-traffic control system for healthcare that would leverage our domain expertise,” Ho said. Without technology, call center operators “cannot possibly make the best decision,” said Blumenberg, the company’s chief technology officer. “There’s too many patients and too many providers, and they are on the phone with a patient and under pressure.”
Eventually, Ho said, Sage’s technology should be able to help health systems cut through the administrative waste to generate 15% to 20% more revenue, while improving care for patients. “That’s the hope of deploying our platform,” he said. “That’s helpful now because health systems are feeling a lot of pressure from the budget cuts.”
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