Exclusive: Translucent, an AI-native healthcare finance startup, raises $27 million Series A

Jack O’Hara has seen a hospital shut down. 

It happens via blurry paperwork and running out of time. O’Hara, through COVID, was chief information and transformation officer at Illinois-based medical center Springfield Clinic. And he and his team were feverishly trying to figure out why the financials of the system’s northern rural market were so wildly off. Data was diffuse at best, and Excel files were “wheel of death-ing.” And come the next board meeting, lacking clarity, leadership shut it all down. 

And by that time, it wasn’t just a chaotic financial problem, it was a human problem.

“Patients, for weeks and weeks later, were saying ‘where am I going to get care now?’” said O’Hara. “And I was like, ‘holy crap, this is really painful.’ They had to drive three hours to come to our main sites. And one in three Americans are in this health desert. When care gets shut down, it’s a huge problem.”

Three years later, O’Hara remains entrenched in the messy economics of hospitals. Healthcare business rules run upside down. Consider: In a “normal” business, you receive a good or service, pay for it there, move on. In healthcare, you see the doctor, there’s probably a copay, and then the real bill shows up months later. (And even then, what the service cost and what the provider gets paid could be different.) So, cash management for hospitals is a moving-target-game of fuzzy, delayed data. Payer middlemen, high labor and facilities costs, and a politically-shifting landscape add to the mix. 

“It’s a massive problem, that this $5 trillion industry is essentially operating at a 1% margin,” said O’Hara. “Hospitals are almost forecasting into a fog.”

O’Hara founded Translucent, an AI-native healthcare finance startup, in 2024 with this idea—that every hospital should have its own AI “financial leader” that always monitors data and offers specific suggestions. The company raised its $7 million seed round in August, and now has raised its $27 million Series A, Fortune has exclusively learned. GV led the round, with participation from NEA, FPV Ventures, and Virtue. 

“Imagine: It’s 9 PM, and I have to pull from seven different systems, then put it into Excel,” said O’Hara. “Then, you have to include your company’s business rules and run an analysis of what you should do tomorrow. Ultimately, there’s not enough people to do that daily.” 

This is especially true in rural health systems, often pressured by financial and workforce challenges. When it comes to finances, it’s hard to find and budget the staff to do this work manually at every turn.

“[Translucent] generates reports that I don’t have to do anymore,” said John Everett, chief financial officer at Colorado-based Wray Community District Hospital and Clinic, and a Translucent customer. “I used to spend 40 to 60 hours building those spreadsheets, now that takes two minutes. We’re making real-time decisions, as opposed to making decisions late by six months to a year.”

Those delays can be costly, not just in the financial but human sense.

“Healthcare is failing financially,” said O’Hara. “You’re running your business in the rearview mirror.”

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com