Seattle-based Cascade Health has raised $1.7m in venture funding to build an intelligent platform for healthcare transparency.

The company’s generative AI-powered cloud platform creates clarity around healthcare pricing, coverage for consumers, employers, government agencies, hospitals, insurance companies and other businesses in the healthcare industry.

The company has also launched its first two products: a generative AI assistant to personalise the consumer experience with full visibility around cost and quality of care; and APIs that allow companies in the healthcare industry to access data on demand and use them to build their own internal and external products.

As healthcare costs have continued to rise in the USA, the system has also grown more complex and increasingly opaque. In an effort to counter this, the US government recently mandated that hospitals and insurance companies publicly disclose pricing data for procedures across the country. Both parties have done so, but in massive files that can’t be opened or used without substantial computing power.

Cascade Health leverages cloud and AI to aggregate these datasets, along with other public and private healthcare data, to help employers, consumers, government agencies, hospitals, insurance companies and other healthcare-related businesses better understand pricing and coverage. It can transform these datasets along with client-specific data and use large language models to interact with the combined data to optimise decision-making in real time to personalise the experience for anyone seeking or giving care.

“We want Cascade Health to become the infrastructure for healthcare transparency, an objective, neutral source for healthcare pricing and coverage,” said Ana-Maria Constantin, Cascade Health’s CEO. “Our intelligent platform provides a window into all this that allows anyone on any side of the healthcare system to make data-driven decisions about the care they receive or deliver.”

The core of Cascade’s intelligent platform is a proprietary massive-scale cloud computing infrastructure which works alongside machine-learning models and AI to help find, sort and transform massive amounts of healthcare data needed to provide transparency into healthcare pricing and coverage.

The generative AI assistant lets consumers ask about coverage options, pricing for different procedures and regions, and more, then uses the platform to deliver data-driven answers to those questions in plain English. The company also provides data management and warehousing infrastructure so users do not have to worry about storing data.

Before founding Cascade Health, Constantin and co-founder Pulak Goyal spent six years at Microsoft building large-scale cloud systems that used machine learning to make intelligent, data-driven decisions for efficient resource use.

The funding round was led by AlleyCorp with participation from other angel investors.

“Complexity and opacity are both endemic in the American healthcare system,” said Jane Suh, principal at AlleyCorp. “It’s nearly impossible for stakeholders to make truly informed decisions, whether it’s about individual or group coverage, or how to most efficiently deliver and pay for care. We invested in Cascade Health because the team’s background and knowledge base perfectly align with their mission to bring clarity and access to an essential part of healthcare decision-making.”

Founded by serial entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, AlleyCorp is a New York-based venture capital firm that founds and invests in transformative companies across dedicated verticals for diversified technology, healthcare, robotics and social impact. Companies incubated by AlleyCorp include MongoDB, Gilt Groupe, Business Insider, Zola, Nomad Health, Pearl Health and Transcend Therapeutics. In addition to founding companies, AlleyCorp invests across pre-seed, seed and series A.