Prescribing medicine to patients is just one step in improving their health. Ensuring patients begin and continue treatment is an important part of the process.
From prescribing to long-term medication adherence, wide gaps continue to exist in patient experiences. Many life sciences companies find that efforts to engage and support patients after a drug is prescribed remain inadequate due to siled data, disparate systems, and poor collaboration.
Courier Health launched a biopharmaceutical-specific artificial intelligence-powered platform in 2022 that manages the end-to-end patient journey from education to patient enrollment, benefits, prior authorization, treatment initiation and adherence. The company says Courier Health’s AI agents can automate tasks such as intake, benefit checks and information requests.
Courier Health has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Oak HC/FT with participation from existing investors including Norwest Venture Partners and Work-Bench. Norwest Venture Partners and Work-Bench also supported Courier Health’s $16.5 million Series A funding round in July 2024 as the company builds a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for life sciences companies.
Courier Health founder and CEO Danny Sigurdsson said the startup aims to “rewrite the patient experience in healthcare,” starting by simplifying and orchestrating the complex patient journey for those who rely on innovative medicines.
“The focus is on engaging and supporting patients with chronic and rare diseases on their journey, and medicines are a very important part of that journey,” he told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
Executives said the new funding will help Courier Health invest in product innovation, including expanding its agent AI capabilities and strengthening its recruiting team across products, engineering, client solutions and sales.
A recent report found that nearly 60% of biopharmaceutical companies believe their data is fragmented or unresponsive, and less than 10% have sufficient data maturity to leverage AI in meaningful ways.
Courier Health has built technology to solve these pain points by connecting data and systems related to the patient experience, applying intelligence to surface insights and proactively identifying at-risk patients, executives said.
Despite billions of dollars being spent on drug research and development and bringing drugs to market, getting approved medicines into the hands of patients remains a challenge due to low activation and retention rates for many biopharmaceutical companies.
According to IQVIA data, more than half of newly released specialty drug prescriptions never reach patients. IQVIA’s 2024 pharmacy claims analysis was conducted according to new active substance formulations launched in 2022-2023. Of all claims, 52% were rejected by the original payer, 13% were ultimately approved by another payer, and 39% were rejected by all payers. This means that 61% of the original claims were ultimately approved and fulfilled, but 17% were later abandoned and only 44% actually reached the patient.
“A lot of money is being spent on raising awareness for doctors, patients and communities, but frankly the rate of success for patients and their doctors and achieving the health outcomes we all expect is pretty abysmal,” Sigurdsson said. “For every 10 patients prescribed specialty therapy, three never even start, and another three to four stop within the first few months.”
“When we talk about helping provide a better patient experience, it’s about taking all of that complexity out of the last mile of the process. We’re taking the data that’s out there, from providers, payers, prior authorization systems, pharmacies, financial aid, foundations, communities, in some cases educators, all the different offerings, and bringing it together into one. “It’s about orchestrating a better, more seamless patient experience for both patients and providers. People actually have access to innovative medicines and a chance to succeed with them,” Sigurdsson said.
Courier Health has designed a platform with deep data integration, intelligent workflows driven by context-rich AI, an intuitive user interface designed specifically for market access and patient services teams, and AI agents that can perform critical tasks for reliable automation and scale. The goal is to provide biopharmaceutical teams with better visibility, control and data intelligence to ensure quality interactions with healthcare providers, pharmacies, and even patients and their families, executives said.
“From an agent perspective, we’re really thinking about what are the opportunities to support human users, patient service teams, and reimbursement teams in the field. There are also opportunities where there are very clear outcomes that can be done to complement human users and actually do the work agentically. For example, when handling patient admissions, the ability to explain well-defined outcomes makes AI agents powerful. We’re doing a lot of work to make sure it’s safe and secure, but it also operates autonomously and very intelligently, giving human users time to focus on higher-level tasks that require empathy, creative thinking, and human interaction.”
Courier Health plans to continue investing in AI capabilities to integrate and connect data, orchestrate workflows and perform patient engagement activities, he said, “whether it’s AI supplementing human users or fully agent AI performing specific tasks with clear outcomes.”
In 2025, Courier Health increased the number of customers and treatments supported on its platform by more than 400% and more than doubled its headcount to meet market demand. The company claims that its clients have seen a 15% to 20% increase in patient initiations and a 10% to 12% increase in six-month retention rates.
“Healthcare, and especially life sciences, has long lacked a dedicated, purpose-built platform for managing patients,” Billy Deitch, partner at Oak HC/FT, said in a statement. “True patient centricity is often promised but rarely delivered. Courier Health changes that narrative. Courier Health provides critical infrastructure and a highly thoughtful AI strategy that biopharmaceutical companies are excited to rapidly deploy. Oak is proud to partner with Danny and his team as they redefine the standard for patient experience.”
