Insider Brief
- Youlify raised $4.3M in seed funding to automate healthcare revenue cycle management using a generative AI platform that replaces traditional billing workflows, from coding to denial recovery.
- Founded by Dr. Bo Gu, Sally Liang, and Howard Peng, the company’s AI system has shown up to 21% revenue increases and 90% denial reductions for early adopters by operating across EHRs and insurance portals.
- Investors include Bonfire Ventures, Top Harvest, Illia Polosukhin, and Dan Roth, with the new funding aimed at expanding into private practices and launching an AI voice agent for real-time insurance appeals.
PRESS RELEASE — Youlify, a physician-founded AI company rebuilding the financial backbone of healthcare, has announced $4.3 million in seed funding to help hospitals and doctors get paid faster and more accurately. The platform replaces traditional billers with AI and provides an end-to-end revenue cycle management platform that completely automates coding, claims, and denial recovery. The round was led by Brett Queener at Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Top Harvest (former GV partners), Illia Polosukhin (co-founder of NEAR Protocol), and Dan Roth (Distinguished Professor at University of Pennsylvania & Chief AI Scientist @ Oracle).
Fixing a $262 Billion Bottleneck in Healthcare
Despite the more than $100 billion spent annually on medical billing services, U.S. healthcare providers still lose an estimated $262 billion every year to denied or unpaid claims. Traditional billing vendors abandon 75% of denied claims as they are too complex and costly to chase with manual labor. Meanwhile, reimbursement timelines stretch for months, leaving providers to navigate opaque systems with little recourse.
Youlify flips that model. Its generative AI agent automates the entire billing lifecycle-from claim creation to appeals and payment recovery-cutting timelines from months to days. Early customers are reporting up to 21% increases in revenue and 90% reduction in denials.
“Youlify boosted my practice billing revenue by more than 20%. They gave my practice insights on coding and better documentation. With Youlify, I am able to scale my practice without thinking about my back office operations.” Dr. Chime, Surgeon, COO of Hillside Polymedic
“People don’t realize how hard it is for doctors to get paid for care they’ve already delivered,” said Dr. Bo Gu, co-founder and CEO of Youlify who was the Department Chair during the pandemic. “I lived it. As a Physician leader during COVID, I saw our department lose 40% of its revenue because the billing system was broken. We built Youlify so that frontline providers don’t have to fight to get reimbursed.”
By Physicians, for Physicians-Powered by Real AI
Founded by Dr. Bo Gu (former Cardiac Surgeon and Emergency Physician), Sally Liang (AI Fintech veteran who helped beat Google in enterprise AI search), and Howard Peng (PhD in NLP and former Head of AI at NewsBreak), Youlify combines clinical insight with its leading AI model. Its proprietary AI agent was purpose-built for revenue cycle management and operates across EHRs, insurance portals, and billing software-handling structured and unstructured data in real time.
Unlike legacy vendors, Youlify delivers:
- 21% higher revenue capture via missed claims detection and undercoding correction
- Lightspeed onboarding in under one week and get paid four times faster
- Transparent data insights into insurance reimbursement performance, coding optimization and data insights for revenue growth.
“Youlify is one of the most technically advanced platforms we’ve seen in healthcare,” said Brett Queener, General Partner at Bonfire Ventures. “They’re not just automating billing-they’re rebuilding the financial backbone of how care gets paid for. The team’s physician-led insight gives them an edge most startups can’t learn secondhand. This is the kind of company that doesn’t just improve a broken system-it completely replaces it.”
With this new funding, Youlify will accelerate its expansion into private practices and multi-specialty medical groups across the country, bringing its technology directly to the front lines of care delivery. The team is also launching an AI-powered voice agent to automate insurance appeals in real time-a task that today consumes hours of staff time and often goes unresolved.
About Youlify
Youlify is a Physician-founded AI company streamlining how providers get paid. Built by AI experts, the platform automates end-to-end revenue cycle management with a generative AI agent that works across the complex matrix of insurance claims, EHRs, and billing systems. Youlify helps physicians and hospitals boost revenue, reduce administrative burden, and recover the money they’re owed-faster.
For more information, visit www.youlify.ai
Media Contact:
Lauren Wallack-Estes
Lauren@outlierpartners.com
Outlier Partners
Featured image: Credit: Youlify
