Rightway Raises $155M Series E for Pharmacy Benefits AI

Rightway has raised a $155M Series E to expand the AI and technology behind its pharmacy benefit management and care navigation business. Francisco Partners led the financing, with existing investors Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures participating.

The September 24, 2026 announcement puts new capital behind a specific challenge in employer healthcare: pharmacy benefits can promise large discounts while preserving incentives that reward the administrator when drug spending rises. Rightway says its model removes those incentives and combines transparent economics with pharmacist-led navigation.

Rightway plans to use the financing to expand AI capabilities, reduce administrative work for pharmacists, surface cost and care opportunities earlier, and give employers and members more flexibility. The bet is that better software can make a more aligned pharmacy benefit easier to operate at scale without moving clinical judgment out of the workflow.

What Rightway Announced

Rightway's Series E was led by Francisco Partners, with Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures returning. A Form D filed with the SEC reports $154,999,891 sold to 6 investors and lists August 25, 2026 as the first sale date. The company did not disclose a new valuation or identify the other 3 investors.

Rightway was founded in 2017 by CEO Jordan Feldman and his father, cardiologist Dr. Theodore Feldman, now Chief Medical Officer. The company began with care navigation, then built its pharmacy benefit manager after concluding that member guidance alone could not change medication costs while another organization controlled formularies, pricing mechanics, and the channels through which prescriptions were filled.

The public funding history shows how that strategy developed. Rightway announced an $8M Series A in 2019, a $20M Series B led by Thrive Capital later that year, and a $100M Series C led by Khosla Ventures in 2021 at a reported $1.1B valuation. A separate March 2024 Form D reports $108.75M sold in an equity offering, but the filing does not assign it a round label.

The PBM Economics Behind the Round

A pharmacy benefit manager negotiates drug prices, designs formularies, processes prescription claims, and manages pharmacy networks for employers and health plans. Those functions sit between the company paying for the benefit, the member filling a prescription, the pharmacy dispensing it, and the manufacturer setting the drug's economics.

The market is concentrated. The Federal Trade Commission reported that the 3 largest PBMs managed 79% of U.S. prescription drug claims for roughly 270M people. The FTC also highlighted vertical integration between large PBMs, insurers, and pharmacy businesses, a structure that can make it difficult for plan sponsors to see where margin is earned.

Rightway says its PBM charges one administrative fee per member, passes every rebate dollar to the client, keeps no spread or dispensing revenue, and owns no pharmacies. Its SureSpend model includes a Precision Pricing Guarantee that sets a maximum on total pharmacy spend. A Zero-Markup Wrap covers categories that are often excluded from guarantees, including GLP-1 therapies and rare high-cost medications, at net cost with rebate pass-through.

Those claims describe the company's contract and operating model. They do not, by themselves, settle how every employer population will perform. Drug mix, specialty utilization, formulary decisions, member engagement, implementation quality, and the details of each contract still shape the outcome.

Why Pharmacists and AI Share the Same Roadmap

Rightway's use of AI is less interesting as a label than as an allocation of work. The company says it will use AI to remove administrative tasks from pharmacists, identify cost and care opportunities earlier, and give clinical teams more context for personalized support. That keeps the human role focused on medication decisions rather than moving pharmacists out of the process.

Chief Pharmacy Officer Kristin Devlin, PharmD, framed the problem around the gap between why pharmacists enter healthcare and how much time retail and administrative systems leave for patient guidance. Rightway's model puts pharmacists and pharmacy technicians into member interactions, while technology handles claims data, employer reporting, and the search for lower-cost or higher-value options.

The distinction matters because PBM software does more than display prices. It must process claims, apply plan rules, manage formularies, connect with benefit systems, recognize exceptions, and support a member who may be standing at a pharmacy counter. AI can help surface a decision, but accountability still belongs to the benefit design, the clinical team, and the contract.

What Scale Now Has to Prove

Rightway says 45 Fortune 500 companies now use its pharmacy benefit model. Its official materials also describe millions of covered members and cite employer savings and service metrics. Those figures are company-reported, so the most useful signal is the purchasing behavior behind them: major employers are willing to move pharmacy benefits away from incumbent structures when an alternative can promise both transparency and operational support.

The Series E gives Rightway room to deepen its technology, expand clinical capacity, and support more complicated drug categories. It also raises the standard for evidence. Large plan sponsors will expect predictable implementation, accurate claims, measurable net cost, reliable member support, and clear reporting across populations that do not behave like a controlled product demonstration.

Francisco Partners is investing at the point where Rightway's model must become durable infrastructure. The contract has to remain legible. The pharmacists need the software to help rather than distract. Benefits leaders need to see the economics before renewal, not after a surprise appears in the spend report.

Rightway's next phase will be decided in those recurring employer and member decisions. Each formulary choice, high-cost prescription, rebate reconciliation, and support call will test whether aligned incentives remain visible when the company, the drug budget, and the technology all get larger.