Develop Health Secures $14.3M Series A to Revolutionize Medication Access with GenAI

Develop Health has raised $14.3 million in Series A funding, led by Wing Venture Capital with participation from Afore Capital, J Ventures, and South Park Commons. The round brings the company’s total funding to $17.6 million as it sets out to automate one of healthcare’s most painful bottlenecks: prior authorization and medication access.

Building the First GenAI-Native Medication Access Platform

At its core, Develop Health is rethinking how providers interact with payers. The company has built the first medication access platform fully architected around generative AI. Instead of relying on patchwork automation, it leverages over a dozen purpose-built large language model pipelines designed to mimic the reasoning and follow-up work that human staff must typically handle.

The system integrates directly with electronic health records (EHRs), embedding into provider workflows without disrupting how care teams operate. From the moment a prescription is written, the platform verifies insurance coverage in real time, generates the correct prior authorization package, submits it through the appropriate channel, and continues to track its progress until approval. All status updates and structured data flow back into the EHR automatically.

By reducing the back-and-forth between providers and payers, Develop Health slashes form completion time by more than 80% and significantly increases approval rates. What previously required weeks of faxes, phone calls, and manual tracking is compressed into minutes of fully automated processing.

Tackling a Hidden Healthcare Bottleneck

Founded by Mel van Londen and Benjamin Easton, Develop Health was born out of firsthand frustration with the inefficiencies of payer-provider communication. Their experiences at Canvas Medical and Rupa Health exposed just how damaging administrative delays could be—blocking patient access to necessary treatments, creating revenue losses for providers, and worsening health outcomes.

“We believe providers should be able to make care decisions with full visibility into a patient’s plan, because a prescription that isn’t affordable or accessible is no prescription at all,” said Mel van Londen. “We’re building healthcare’s agentic clearinghouse, starting with medication access and designing infrastructure that meets both payers and providers where they are.”

Scaling Across Benefits and Care Settings

The new funding will allow Develop Health to expand beyond pharmacy benefits into medical benefits, an area equally plagued by inefficiency. This means providers will be able to streamline access not just to medications like GLP-1s or treatments in addiction, neurology, dermatology, and psychiatry, but also to procedures and therapies typically buried in opaque prior authorization processes.

By deepening integrations with EHRs and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), Develop Health is creating an interoperable layer that can eventually serve both digital health innovators and traditional providers. The company’s mission is to become essential infrastructure for any healthcare organization dealing with coverage and access challenges.

The Technology Behind the Platform

Develop Health’s technical architecture is what sets it apart. Instead of using a single general-purpose LLM, the platform deploys multiple specialized AI pipelines:

• Insurance Verification Agents trained on payer documentation to determine real-time coverage and eligibility.
• Authorization Generation Models that assemble and format prior authorization requests automatically.
• Multi-Channel Submission Tools that can push forms through ePA, fax, portals, or phone transcripts.
• Continuous Monitoring Agents that track payer responses, escalate exceptions, and push updates back into the EHR.
• Analytics Modules that surface denial trends and help providers proactively adjust workflows.

Together, these AI agents replicate the “back-office staff” role at machine speed, reducing administrative friction and ensuring patients receive timely care.

The Future of Autonomous Healthcare Administration

Develop Health’s rise underscores a pivotal shift: the future of healthcare will be shaped as much by administrative transformation as by medical breakthroughs. Generative AI is no longer just a tool for documentation or summarization—it is becoming the engine for autonomous systems that can act on behalf of providers, navigate payer requirements, and remove barriers to care.

In the coming years, platforms like Develop Health will evolve into autonomous healthcare agents—digital colleagues that can manage entire workflows from start to finish. Prior authorization is only the beginning. Claims processing, medical coding, billing, appeals, care coordination, and even patient financial counseling could all be handled by AI systems that continuously learn, negotiate, and adapt to shifting regulations and payer rules.

This future points toward a healthcare system where administrative complexity no longer dictates the pace of treatment. Instead, decisions will flow seamlessly from provider to patient, with AI-powered infrastructure ensuring that coverage, compliance, and communication happen automatically in the background.

For patients, this means faster access to lifesaving therapies. For providers, it means reclaiming time and revenue lost to paperwork. And for the healthcare industry as a whole, it marks the beginning of a new era where AI is not just an assistant, but an autonomous operator of critical healthcare processes.