Understood Care Raises $8.4 Million to Scale AI-Driven Patient Advocacy for Medicare Population

New updates have been reported about Understood Care.

Understood Care has secured a total of $8.4 million in financing to accelerate its AI-native patient advocacy platform focused on Medicare beneficiaries and older adults navigating a fragmented U.S. healthcare system. The raise includes a $5 million seed round led by Rethink Education and Zeal Capital Partners and $3.4 million in pre-seed funding led by 1984 Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, providing capital to expand technology, operations, and commercial partnerships.

The company will use the funds to advance Ava, its AI co-pilot that automates administrative and documentation-heavy tasks so human advocates can manage more patients while maintaining high-touch support. Understood Care’s model combines remote advocates with clinical, administrative, and social work backgrounds and AI-driven workflows to schedule appointments, secure benefits, complete applications, and resolve non-clinical barriers such as transportation, housing, and medication access.

Understood Care is leveraging new CMS payment pathways introduced in 2024 that support care navigation, enabling its advocacy services to be reimbursed under CMS-recognized codes and minimizing out-of-pocket costs for most patients. This positions the company as an infrastructure layer for payers and providers that need scalable, compliant solutions to improve satisfaction, reduce missed appointments, and lower total cost of care, particularly for the growing Medicare and disabled adult populations.

Since launching patient care in March 2025, Understood Care has expanded to all 50 states and already supports thousands of patients, with frequent bidirectional engagement between advocates and members. The company has credentialed providers nationwide and established relationships with three of the largest Medicare Advantage plans, creating a distribution channel that could enable it to onboard more than 10,000 additional patients in 2026 and deepen integration into core healthcare workflows.

Ava operates behind the scenes to initiate calls, summarize records and transcripts, draft communications, identify relevant resources, conduct web research, and generate Medicare-compliant documentation, feeding a proprietary multimodal dataset of interactions and outcomes. As this dataset grows, the platform is designed to improve efficiency, personalization, and scalability of advocacy, strengthening Understood Care’s competitive moat and supporting its goal of making patient advocacy a standard part of healthcare delivery rather than a boutique service.

CEO and co-founder Sam Wu positions the company as building the infrastructure and payment model required to deliver personalized advocacy at scale, addressing a structural gap in how older and disabled adults access care. Backing from healthcare-focused investors underscores expectations that AI-enabled navigation will become a key cost-control and patient-experience lever for payers and providers, with Understood Care aiming to become a default advocacy layer embedded across Medicare and Medicare Advantage ecosystems.