Cleveland's Graici Secures $7.5M in Series A Funding
Graici lives squarely in the second camp. Born in 2021 as a spin-out from Unify Labs, Graici did not come from a brainstorm; it came from friction. Stephen McHale has spent decades watching systems fail quietly while people pay loudly, and this company is the byproduct of refusing to normalize that failure.
This week, Graici closed a $7.5M Series A led by Santé Ventures, with continued support from North Coast Ventures, JumpStart Ventures, OVO Fund, University Hospitals Ventures, and Unify Labs. On paper, it brings total funding to $15M. In practice, it buys leverage against a Medicaid system that just disenrolled more than 25M people, roughly 70% for paperwork reasons. Not fraud. Not ineligibility. Just forms, timing, and silence. Bureaucracy is undefeated until someone builds software that understands humans.
Graici’s Adaptive Data Wallet™ is not another dashboard pretending to be empathy. It acquires, secures, and activates whole-life data with consent, automating Medicaid renewals and redeterminations end-to-end. Voice, text, multi-party communication, and AI that works the problem instead of escalating it. Healthcare data meets economic reality, meets personal context, meets action. Graici is not asking people to prove they deserve care every year. It is proving the system can do better if it stops wasting motion.
Stephen McHale, CEO, has been here before. Explorys, Everstream, Unify Labs. Building large, boring, necessary infrastructure and selling it when it works. This time the stakes are more human. Backed by a board that now includes Dr. Joe Cunningham of Santé Ventures, the company is aligning clinical credibility with operational muscle. Add leaders like Deb Palmer George, Chief Wellbeing Officer, shaping wellbeing; Aaron Cornell, CFO, keeping the financial engine honest; Nick Seritti, VP of Cloud Infrastructure & Security, locking down cloud and security; and you get a team that understands that trust is not a feature, it is the product.
The lesson is not about AI hype or funding cycles. It is about focus. Graici picked a mess everyone complains about and nobody fixes, then built technology that removes friction instead of adding meetings. Health plans, state agencies, providers, and FQHCs are not short on data. They are short on systems that move it with purpose. Graici is betting that adaptive engagement beats static process every time, and the market just agreed to keep watching what happens next.