Announcing Stedi’s $70 million Series B to build the only AI-enabled clearinghouse

In February of last year, I gathered our engineering team in a war room. Change Healthcare – the nation’s largest clearinghouse for healthcare claims processing – had been down for almost a full week due to a cyberattack that would ultimately render them unable to process many types of transactions for two months or longer. 

It’s hard to explain the magnitude of the Change Healthcare outage to people outside the healthcare industry. Nearly 40% of healthcare claims processed in the United States flowed through Change’s platform. They processed an aggregate $1.5 trillion of claims volume annually – 15 billion claims – and they were the exclusive designated clearinghouse for dozens of payers ranging from small regional payers to UnitedHealthcare, Change’s parent company. Healthcare spend in the US is $4.9 trillion annually – 18% of total GDP – which means that when Change went down, it was processing roughly 5.5% of US GDP. 

When the seriousness of Change’s situation became clear, we worked around the clock to accelerate the development of our own clearinghouse that we had planned to launch later that year. We announced a drop-in replacement for Change’s clearinghouse just a few days later, and the 7 weeks afterwards were unlike anything I had experienced in 20 years of business. We couldn’t leave our keyboards during any waking hour of the day for more than a few minutes at a time – 6 and 7 figure deals went from initial phone call or text message to signed terms in under an hour. 

Change Healthcare has long since come back online, but our growth trajectory has only steepened. In April 2025, we were named Ramp’s 3rd-fastest growing software vendor. Last month, we signed 5x the number of customers that we signed at the height of the Change outage. Stedi has become the de facto choice for virtually every new venture-backed health tech company – and as later-stage health tech companies and traditional institutions revisit their legacy clearinghouse dependencies in the wake of the Change outage, Stedi’s cloud-native, API-first platform has become the obvious choice. 

But more and more, our growth is driven by GenAI use cases from all segments of the market – from brand new startups to traditional companies coming to Stedi to build agentic functionality into their existing platform. One-third of our customer base is now made up of fully native GenAI companies, an extremely high-growth cohort that has collectively raised an astounding $5B in funding to date. 

Today, we’re announcing our own $70 million Series B fundraise, co-led by Stripe and Addition, with participation from USV, First Round, Bloomberg Beta, BoxGroup, Ribbit Capital, and other top investors, which includes a $50 million previously-unannounced round plus $20 million of new capital.

Our mission is to make healthcare transactions as reliable as running water. This new funding has allowed us to double down on rebuilding the backbone of healthcare transaction infrastructure as Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) undergoes an AI-driven transformation. In addition to our best-in-class APIs, we’ve made it even easier for development teams to integrate to our clearinghouse using the new MCP server launched last week. Yesterday, we launched the Stedi Agent to power AI functionality within our platform directly.

What’s driving the AI boom in RCM? 

RCM is practically designed to be automatable using AI. Every claim, remittance, and eligibility check is already transmitted in a well-structured transaction, giving AI models clean, labeled data to work with. RCM workflows are rule-bound – that is, every step is governed by explicit payer or regulatory logic. Eligibility follows coverage rules; claim submissions and resubmissions must meet payer-specific requirements; denial appeals hinge on predefined evidence thresholds and deadlines. Because each decision is effectively a yes/no test against a published rule set, accuracy can be measured objectively and improvements validated quickly – ideal conditions for AI agents to learn, iterate, and outperform manual processes.

But when it comes to implementing AI workflows, development teams hit frustrating roadblocks with legacy clearinghouses. Most of the functionality offered by legacy clearinghouses is not accessible programmatically. If you’re lucky, you might be able to do basic eligibility and claim submission using an API – a distant second-class citizen to the clearinghouse’s main focus: traditional EHR integration. More often, you’re relying on brittle portal scraping, email capture, and PDF parsing to attempt to stitch together a passable workflow. 

The legacy clearinghouses are unlikely to get much better. They were built pre-cloud computing (and in many cases, pre-internet), and most are the result of a series of private equity acquisitions with tech stacks that were never harmonized or modernized. As a result, the technology roadmaps move at a glacial pace – the people who built the systems have long since departed and most of the effort is expended on ‘keep the lights on’ maintenance. 

Stedi’s approach is API-first: every piece of functionality available through our user interface is available via API, from the basics like eligibility checks, claims, and remits to the often-neglected aspects like payer search and transaction enrollment. Alongside our APIs, we offer a full suite of modern user interfaces that are easy for non-technical users to use.

Our thesis is simple: as more and more aspects of RCM software are subsumed by agentic workflows, companies will shift ever-greater portions of their workloads to the platforms that offer the best accessibility and legibility to AI agents that are performing actions; since other clearinghouses don’t offer ways to perform tasks programmatically, customers will continue to migrate to Stedi as they build net-new workflows, or as they find that existing workflows come to exceed the requirements afforded by other clearinghouses.

We have a single question that we use to guide our roadmap decisions: does this make it easier for humans and agents to interact with our platform? This has led to dozens of small improvements and major launches over the past several months, and will lead to many more. This latest investment allows us to continue to expand the breadth and depth of our transaction functionality in order to serve the needs of the smallest providers and the largest health systems, and everyone in between.

Most importantly, it allows us to accelerate hiring of world-class talent across engineering, product, design, business operations, and more. If that sounds exciting to you, come work with us.