Elevating Our Business and Our Brand: AKASA Secures Additional Funding

We have exciting company news to share. First, we have raised a $60 million Series B round, led by BOND, and joined by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Costanoa Ventures, and other existing investors. Noah Knauf, general partner at BOND, is joining our board.

The funding enables us to continue to scale operations to meet rapidly growing customer demand, accelerate delivery of products to customers, invest in high-caliber talent across the organization, and further expand our market presence.

We have seen tremendous demand from health systems in adapting to highly variable operational environments over the last year. Shifting business dynamics driven by the pandemic in 2020 have intensified the need for automation as organizations face massive financial pressures while abruptly transitioning their teams to remote work.

As these challenges arose, health system leaders quickly recognized that automation tools for the revenue cycle have transformed from nice-to-haves to need-to-haves. In fact, a survey we commissioned indicates that more than 60% of health systems that do not currently use revenue cycle automation plan to do so by the end of this year.

We are also unveiling our new brand identity today — AKASA — and we love our new akasa.com domain. The new brand and domain will better scale with the company’s ambitions over the long term.

Akasa refers to sky, space, or aether in Sanskrit. In medieval science, there were four classic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Akasa or aether was a proposed “5th element” used to explain a number of natural phenomena that were not scientifically understood at the time.

Healthcare delivery has its own four elements known as “the four Ps”: patients, providers, payers, and pharma. Underlying these four Ps is the “5th element” of healthcare — the complex infrastructure of our industry. AKASA enables providers to efficiently navigate financial and operational complexity in revenue cycle operations — a key driver of healthcare costs in the United States.

Also, for anyone who’s been to our office, you know our love for space-travel-themed posters, so akasa’s dual meaning as “space” appealed to our innate sense of identity.

AKASA’s machine-learning-based solution, Unified Automation™, adapts to the highly dynamic nature of revenue cycle operations. Our unique expert-in-the-loop approach imbues the entire automation process with human judgment and subject matter expertise. Unified Automation enables health systems to reduce their cost to collect so they can invest more in patient care and be better stewards of the healthcare dollar.

Most importantly, we remain committed to delivering rapid value to our customers and focused on executing against our mission to remedy financial complexity in order to reduce healthcare costs for everyone.