Coral raises $12.5M to automate healthcare’s back office by working with, not against, the fax machine
Coral raises $12.5M to automate healthcare’s back office by working with, not against, the fax machine
In less than a year, Coral has grown to multiple millions in revenue, pushed complete patient intakes to under five minutes, and is winning customers in infusion and specialty pharmacy who trust it enough to pay full contracts upfront. Its next target: 4x growth before the year is out.
New York, April 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — In American healthcare, the most common reason a patient waits is not clinical. Referrals stall in fax queues. Prior authorizations sit unresolved. Discharges are delayed because paperwork has not been processed. The bottleneck is not a shortage of doctors. There is a shortage of people to handle the administrative work that comes before and after every appointment.
Coral was built to change that. Today, the company announced a $12.5 million investment led by Lightspeed and Z47. The company was founded by Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty.
Team Coral: advancing its automation platform built for specialty providers in US healthcare.
For Ajay, the problem was not abstract. A minor accident sent him through the US healthcare system as a patient for the first time, and what followed was instructive. The clinical care was not the issue. Everything surrounding it was: follow-up calls that went unanswered for days, paperwork that outlasted the injury itself. Coral was the answer the two of them built to that experience.
Coral’s founding insight was simple. Do not replace the fax. Automate around it. Instead of asking providers to rebuild their infrastructure, Coral connects to existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals and automates end-to-end administrative workflows for specialty healthcare providers, including DME suppliers, infusion centers, and radiology practices. The platform handles intake, prior authorization, fax processing, and patient communications without requiring providers to change how they work.
Coral’s models have now reached 99.7% accuracy on the document types that define healthcare’s back office: handwritten fax forms, scanned insurance cards, prior authorization templates, payer portal screens. Complete patient intakes, including the most complex cases the platform handles, now run in under five minutes, and when the information is missing, which happens frequently, Coral can seamlessly work with all the relevant parties to get information and process a patient’s case.
Ajay Shrihari, Founder and CEO, Coral said: “Every person in the healthcare system is being slowed down by the same thing: administrative work that was never built to scale. The coordinator chasing faxes. The patient waiting on a referral. The clinician buried in prior authorizations. When you automate the right things, all of them win at once. That is what Coral is building, and we are just getting started.”
Coral began by serving durable medical equipment (DME) providers, proving the model in one of the most fax-intensive corners of outpatient care. As it scaled, the same pattern appeared across every new specialty it entered. The administrative bottleneck was not a DME problem. It was a healthcare problem.
For infusion patients, a treatment delay is not an inconvenience. It is a missed dose. Coral has deployed its platform across infusion centres, handling the authorization and intake workflows that previously kept clinical staff from patients for hours at a time.
The strongest signal of customer confidence is not a case study but what customers choose to hand Coral next. A growing number are now running multiple modules across their operations, and a portion are paying the full contract value upfront, an unusual dynamic in enterprise software and a particularly striking one in a sector where vendor evaluation cycles are notoriously long. The calculation is straightforward: when a complex workflow completes in under five minutes at high accuracy, the return is immediate enough that the commitment follows.
Coral has reached multiple millions in revenues and is targeting 4x growth before the end of the year, expanding further across existing verticals while moving into radiology and additional specialty categories.
Rohil Bagga, Investor at Lightspeed added: “Healthcare is one of the hardest environments to automate, given legacy systems and fragmented workflows, yet Coral is delivering real outcomes at scale. Their product is already being used by some of the largest customers in the U.S. to dramatically reduce patient intake times and first-pass denials. At Lightspeed, we’ve had the privilege of being part of Coral’s journey since day one, and we’re excited to continue supporting the team as they transform the healthcare industry”
Ashwin KP, Investor at Z47 commented: “US healthcare admin carries over a trillion dollars in overhead each year, yet the back-office teams doing this work have been chronically underserved by technology. Our thesis is that the most compelling AI opportunities lie in workflow-heavy, tech-underserved categories that demand deep vertical expertise to crack. Ajay and Aniket are exceptionally customer-obsessed founders who embedded themselves with these teams, understood their pain at a granular level, and built a product their customers can’t live without. The rapid growth and the caliber of customers they’ve won in a short time only reinforced our conviction. We’re privileged to partner with them.”
The round goes toward team and product. Coral is adding engineering talent alongside people who have spent careers inside healthcare operations, builders and industry experts working in the same room for the first time in this category.
On the product side, the company recently shipped AI-powered voice and text workflows, automating follow-ups with payers, patients, and referral sources that would previously require a staff member to pick up the phone. The next phase goes further. Coral is building an AI workflow builder that lets providers design and deploy their own administrative workflows without raising an IT ticket, adapting Coral to the way their operations actually run rather than the other way around.
Alongside that, Coral is developing what it describes as a co-pilot layer for the business: a way to surface intelligence from the data it already processes. Which payers have the highest denial rates and what the common rejection reasons are. Where in the authorization process cases are stalling. Which referral sources convert to completed intakes and which do not. Where revenue is being stopped by insurance claim rejections, and what would change the outcome on resubmission. The ambition is that a practice manager can ask Coral what is slowing their operation down and get a specific, actionable answer, not a report to interpret but a clear next step.
The system is not going to simplify itself. Coral’s answer is that administration is a workflow problem, not a staffing one. Across DME, infusion, and specialty pharmacy, that answer is proving out. The fax queue gets shorter. Staff get to spend their time on patients.
Media images can be found here.
About Coral
Coral is a healthcare automation platform built for specialty providers. By combining intelligent document processing, agentic workflows, and voice automation, Coral integrates with existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals to automate administrative workflows from patient intake and prior authorization to billing, compliance, and patient outreach. Coral reduces human error, accelerates care delivery, and frees up healthcare staff to focus on the work that requires judgment and empathy.
About Lightspeed
Lightspeed is a global multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500 companies globally including Affirm, Acceldata, Carta, Cato Networks, Darwinbox, Epic Games, Faire, Innovaccer, Guardant Health, Mulesoft, Navan, Netskope, Nutanix, Physics Wallah, Razorpay, Rubrik, Sharechat, Snap, OYO Rooms, Ultima Genomics, Zepto and more. Lightspeed and its global team currently manage $30bn+ in AUM across the Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in the U.S., Europe, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia.
About Z47
Founded in 2006, Z47 is an investment Firm with more than 150 investments till date and an AUM of over $3.5 billion. Guided by a ‘founders first’ philosophy, Z47 is committed to backing and prioritising missionary founders over markets. Z47’s focus sectors include Enterprise AI, Financial Services, Consumer, B2B and Advanced Manufacturing amongst others. We are proud partners to several Enterprise AI companies; select ones include AtomicWork, Krutrim, MoEngage, Rocketlane, and Toddle. Other select investments include Dailyhunt, Five Star Business Finance, OfBusiness, Ola, Ola Electric, and Razorpay.
CONTACT: Press contact: media@trycoral.ai
