Forus Raises $150Mn Series C to Expand AI-Powered Medication Access

The AI startup plans to deploy the capital to expand into additional specialties and care settings, enhance its AI agents' capabilities for medication access, and strengthen its workforce.

New York-based Forus, an AI startup formerly known as Tandem that focuses on medication access, has raised $150 million in Series C funding, bringing its total raise to $300 million.

The round was led by Bain Capital Venture, with participation from existing investors including Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Redpoint, BoxGroup, Pear VC, Avra, Human Capital, Neo, Vast Ventures, and SV Angel.

The latest funding comes months after announcing its Series B, taking its total valuation to $3 billion.

The AI startup plans to deploy the capital to expand into additional specialties and care settings, enhance its AI agents' capabilities for medication access, and strengthen its workforce.

Sharing his thoughts, Sahir Jaggi, CEO and founder of Forus, said, “We are putting the Forus platform in every doctor’s office in the country, so every disease is treated with the best medicine science can offer. Medicine is advancing faster than at any point in history, increasing the urgency to make sure those advances reach the people they're meant for. We are building Forus to ensure science is the only limit to medicine."

Founded in 2023, the New York-based startup operates an AI network for medicine, connecting providers, doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma to bring new science to the patients who need it.

It uses AI agents to automate and accelerate every step between a prescription and a person starting treatment, across every drug, payer, and pharmacy in the country, for providers or patients.

The AI platform is directly integrated into the workflow of the provider to manage several administrative steps involved in accessing medicines.

These include prior authorizations, benefits verification, appeals after insurance denials, financial-assistance enrollment, specialty-pharmacy coordination, pharmacy routing, and patient communications.

The startup assigns an AI agent to each prescription. These agents function as case managers, assessing information such as a patient's medical history, insurance coverage, and financial circumstances to determine the next steps required to move the prescription towards treatment.

According to the startup, its prescription-access data can give life sciences companies insight into patient access barriers, drop-off points, and how medicines perform, which can inform drug research and launches.

In earlier development, Forus announced a partnership with the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) to improve medication access for patients with digestive diseases.

The collaboration combined AGA's clinical expertise with Forus' medication access data to identify barriers patients face after a prescription is written. The organizations said the findings may inform AGA's clinical guidance, advocacy efforts, and resources for gastroenterologists.

Further, the startup reported that its technology is currently used by providers across all 50 states to treat patients in 85% of U.S. residential ZIP codes.

Alongside this, it is also now working with 9 of the top 15 global biopharma companies and many biotechs to advance medicine.

Kevin Zhang, General Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said, "Forus is becoming how new medicine reaches people in America. We have backed the company since its seed, and in that time the largest companies in medicine have turned to it to bring their newest medicines to patients. The next era of medicine will run on the AI-powered network Forus is building."

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