Anterior, the clinician-led AI platform for health plans, has raised $40 million in new funding, bringing total capital raised to $64 million. The round saw continued backing from Sequoia Capital and NEA, alongside new investors FPV Ventures and Kinnevik.
Anterior was founded by Dr Abdel Mahmoud, a Libyan-born physician and former product leader at Google. Mahmoud came to the UK as a refugee at eight years old. By 15 he had started his own software business, and by 18 he had joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he became the youngest infantry officer in the UK. He went on to study medicine, but grew frustrated with the administrative burden keeping him from patients, and eventually returned to University College London for a master's in computer science before moving into product roles at Facebook and Google.
That experience across medicine and technology shaped Anterior's core thesis: that large language models, when deployed responsibly alongside clinicians, can automate the vast majority of administrative clinical review work that bogs down health plans and delays patient care. Today, a cancer patient can wait days or weeks for a prior authorisation decision. Anterior says its platform now gets care approved in approximately 155 seconds with 99.24% clinical accuracy, independently validated by KLAS Research.
Since closing a $20 million Series A in June 2024, Anterior has expanded into live production environments across major US health plans, including Geisinger Health Plan, and built integrations with enterprise healthcare technology providers such as HealthEdge. The company now supports organisations collectively covering 50 million lives and says it is on track to reach millions of patients this year. Health plan partners report 3x higher provider NPS scores and millions in operational and medical cost savings annually.
A key differentiator is what the company calls its Forward Deployed Clinician model. Rather than treating implementation as a technical handoff, Anterior embeds clinical experts directly into health plan teams, working alongside nurses and medical directors to refine system performance. The company says this approach has cut clinical review cycles by roughly 75% at one enterprise customer, with staff satisfaction above 90%. Average deployment time is five days.
The new capital will support continued expansion of production deployments, new clinical and operational use cases, and further ecosystem integrations. The company has also added Secretary David Shulkin (former VA Secretary), Peter Long (former CSO, Blue Shield of California), and William Golden (former CEO of Employer & Individual at UnitedHealthcare) as advisors.
"AI in health plans is not struggling because of a technology gap, but because implementation is treated as an afterthought," said Mahmoud. "We built Anterior around a different premise: AI only works in healthcare when it's deployed by clinicians, alongside clinicians."
