Understood Care Raises $5M in Seed Funding to Expand AI Patient Advocacy Platform

Understood Care just pulled in $8.4M in funding, including a $5M Seed round led by Rethink Education and Zeal Capital Partners, with support from 1984 Ventures. Big congrats to Samantha Wu, Co-Founder & CEO, and Kevin Bailey, Co-Founder, for building something that sits right at the intersection of healthcare reality and AI capability. The healthcare system has always had a navigation problem. Understood Care decided to treat navigation itself like infrastructure.

Here is the reality most people outside healthcare miss. Medicine might be advanced, but the logistics around it often feel like paperwork wrestling a fax machine from 1997. That friction hits Medicare patients the hardest. Understood Care built a virtual patient advocacy platform designed specifically for them. Advocates help people schedule appointments, access transportation, apply for financial aid, and actually understand their benefits. The service spans all 50 states and supports thousands of patients who reach out to their advocates about 5 times per month, while advocates proactively connect with patients roughly 11 times monthly. That is not a feature set. That is operational muscle.

The engine behind the curtain is Ava, the company’s AI copilot. Ava handles the messy work that usually burns out care teams. Waiting on hold. Summarizing medical records and call transcripts. Drafting emails, texts, and faxes. Surfacing the right resources when patients hit a wall. Every call, document, workflow, and outcome feeds a growing multimodal dataset built around the real jobs of patient advocacy. The result is something subtle but powerful. The advocates get sharper, faster, and more present with the people who need them. Technology carries the weight so humans can carry the empathy.

There is also a regulatory tailwind that makes this moment interesting. In 2024, patient advocacy became a Medicare covered benefit through CMS recognized advocacy codes. That shift means most Understood Care patients pay zero out of pocket. Healthcare policy opened the door and Understood Care walked in with a product ready to operate at scale. The company launched patient care in March 2025 and expanded nationwide within 8 months. Along the way, they established relationships with 3 of the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage plans and credentialed providers across the country. Quietly, the rails started forming.

Bridget Duru, VP at Rethink Education, pointed out something investors increasingly understand. When you combine human advocacy with the right technology layer, you do not just improve workflows. You unlock access. Understood Care is already aiming to support more than 10,000 new patients in 2026. In a healthcare system serving more than 68M Medicare beneficiaries, that number feels less like a finish line and more like the opening chapter of a much larger story unfolding in real time.