Village Raises $9.5M in Seed Funding to Build AI-Powered Pediatric Care Coordination System
Most healthcare systems talk about coordination the way casinos talk about “responsible gaming.” Nice slogan. Fancy brochure. Somebody’s still getting cleaned out in the parking lot. Then you look at pediatric specialty care and realize families have basically been running a Fortune 500 operations stack out of the Notes app on their phones while sitting in waiting rooms that smell like stale Goldfish crackers and hand sanitizer. One therapist over here. Another referral over there. Insurance paperwork moving through fax machines like it’s still 1997 and somebody just bought a Motorola Razr. Meanwhile, parents are expected to quarterback the whole thing while trying to keep their kid afloat emotionally, physically, developmentally, financially. America loves telling people to “advocate for your child.” Translation: congratulations, you now have a second unpaid full-time job with terrible customer support.
That’s the mess Village walked into. Not with another wellness app pretending gradients and calming fonts count as innovation. With infrastructure. Los Angeles-based Village just raised $9.5M in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Bling Capital, GTMFund, and Perceptive Ventures. Co-Founders Brandon Terry, CEO, and Allan Smith are building an AI-powered health system for specialty pediatrics that connects families, providers, pediatricians, and payers in 1 coordinated environment. Not adjacent pieces. Not another disconnected portal demanding your password every 12 minutes. An actual village. Funny how revolutionary competence starts sounding in healthcare.
And the reason this story lands harder than the average funding headline is because Brandon Terry lived the chaos firsthand while navigating care for his daughter Payton, who was born with a rare chromosomal deletion shared by fewer than 50 children worldwide. The family spent years wrestling fragmented care teams, waitlists, insurance friction, and out-of-pocket costs that hit like a UFC combo. That experience became the blueprint. Allan Smith saw the same fragmentation through his wife’s physical therapy practice and understood the provider side of the circus. 2 operators from Procore looked at pediatric care and saw a system held together with patchwork systems, exhaustion, and prayer circles.
Village already has more than 400 specialty clinicians across Southern California spanning occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech-language pathology, and behavioral health. The company says it has grown patients and platform users 5x since the beginning of 2026 while securing payer relationships with Blue Cross & Blue Shield, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare. People like Kara Cerrone, Head of Payer Strategy & Market Access at Village, are helping build the connective tissue between providers, payers, and families in a system that usually treats coordination like an optional side quest. So Village built Vera, its in-house AI agent that handles documentation, scheduling, billing, coordination, and operational tasks for providers. The name fits. Vera sounds less like software and more like the office assassin quietly making impossible things happen before your coffee cools down. Meanwhile, operators and builders across the company, including founding engineers and growth leaders, are constructing something healthcare desperately needs but rarely delivers: continuity.
The bigger signal here is that healthcare’s next heavyweight era may not belong to companies screaming the loudest about AI. It may belong to the ones using AI to make exhausted humans feel less abandoned inside systems that forgot how to care at scale. Village understood something most startups miss. Families do not need more noise. They need fewer doors, fewer delays, fewer dead ends, and at least 1 platform that can finally see the whole child instead of another billing code floating through the machine.
