a16z and Index Co-Lead $9M Seed for Ferry Health
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Ferry Health has come out of stealth with $9 million in Seed funding to run an autonomous AI assistant that handles healthcare logistics for patients. Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures co-led the round, with Avid Ventures, Layout Ventures, SV Angel, BoxGroup, and Asymmetric Capital Partners participating, along with angels including Jay Desai, co-founder of Bamboo Health, and the founders of Grow Therapy, Hex, and Chapter.
The San Francisco company was founded in early 2024 by CEO Mehul Mehta, previously an investor at a16z Bio + Health, along with Keyur Mehta and Andrew Buie.
The target is the administrative friction in healthcare that patients hit when trying to get care: phone tag, ghost provider networks, and health plan directories that went stale years ago. Ferry deploys AI agents that call clinics, confirm active insurance coverage, verify subspecialty fit, and book the appointment on the patient’s behalf.
The flow starts with a patient texting or messaging Ferry’s assistant about a clinical need, referral, or specialty requirement. Instead of querying a static directory database, the company’s voice and digital agents call provider offices directly. They verify active insurance participation, confirm exact clinic locations, cross-check clinical subspecialty fit, and find open calendar slots. The agents then handle the scheduling back-and-forth and confirm the booking, without the patient placing a single call. Early access cohorts are also using the agents to coordinate outpatient diagnostic imaging, retrieve records, and arrange home health services.
Distribution runs through institutions rather than direct consumer acquisition. Ferry partners with regional health systems, commercial health insurers, digital health providers, and care navigation platforms. The platform is live across all 50 states and accessible to more than 1 million covered individuals, with enterprise contracts projected to take that above 5 million by the end of 2026.
The gap Ferry is filling is worth naming. Large language models have been widely adopted for conversational health queries and clinical documentation, but consumer navigation still runs on the phone. Most doctors’ offices, specialty clinics, and imaging centers expose no open APIs and no online self-scheduling. Pairing model reasoning with autonomous voice calling gives patients a surrogate that can work with medical practices as they actually operate.
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