Healthcare organizations are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence technologies, but there is no clear blueprint for how to measure the business value of these investments.
According to a Menlo Ventures analysis last fall, the healthcare industry is adopting AI at more than twice the rate of the economy as a whole. According to a report by Silicon Valley Bank, investments in AI healthcare companies accounted for 46% of total spending, totaling $18 billion, making AI the dominant healthcare investment environment in 2025. However, many of these AI investments are not producing tangible results.
A July 2025 report (PDF) from MIT’s NANDA Initiative found that 95% of enterprise-generated AI pilots fail to achieve measurable return on investment (ROI).
Startup Optura was founded a year ago to help healthcare organizations decide where their AI investments will actually benefit. The company has built a platform for healthcare organizations to quickly assess the business value and feasibility of AI, prioritize AI investments, and gain clear visibility into the impact and benefits of AI to the enterprise in real time. The company has developed a framework called Return on AI Investment (ROAI) to help companies understand, predict, and track value creation from their technology initiatives.
The company has raised a $17.5 million Series A round led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Echo Health Ventures and continued investment from Susa Ventures, Matrix Partners, and HC9 Ventures. Optura has raised $25 million to date. A year ago, the startup secured $6.5 million in seed funding from Susa Ventures and Matrix Partners.
Optura co-founders Andy Fanning and Michael Hollis aim to take AI from a buzzword to a practical system and have built a platform that gives healthcare organizations control, visibility, and real ROI.
“We both found that the market was completely paralyzed when it came to AI adoption. The issue is not so much a technical issue as it is the technical ability to execute AI, it’s a trust issue,” Hollis, Optura’s president, told Fierce Healthcare. “We want to show, quantify and prove that AI can impact these healthcare organizations at scale.”
“Hundreds of AI use cases and the introduction of foundational models like Claude for Healthcare into the healthcare market are driving AI spending and increasing risk,” CEO Fanning said in a statement. “Also, there was no objective framework to help healthcare leaders measure the ROI of their AI investment decisions, creating a never-ending menu of point solutions. We developed Optura to take the guesswork out and enable healthcare organizations to objectively measure results.”
Fanning spent years leading business transformation and AI strategy at Cigna, and Hollis helped build Emids into a top digital health company.
Optura’s platform systematically maps an organization’s existing data into a unified knowledge layer, so all decisions are made based on how the organization works, scoring and ranking use cases against the organization’s priorities, cost, and readiness. The company says its platform can transform top priorities into AI agents trained specifically for healthcare and built directly from workflows and standard operating procedures.
Optura’s platform simulates expected revenue, allowing organizations to determine expected value before implementation. The company can then deploy AI agents across the enterprise and track results, efforts, and projected value in one unified real-time dashboard with clear visibility into AI impact, executives said.
“We help organizations experience that ‘aha’ moment of, ‘How does this actually apply to my business? How does this apply to my line of business?’ We turn their ideas into something of value,” Hollis said.
He added that the company is working closely with the organization’s leadership.
“We start with the business. We don’t start with the technology. Again, this is not a technology issue. This is a behavior issue. It’s less about what AI can do for them and more about what are they trying to accomplish as a business?” he said. “Everyone is going through a huge transformational period right now. A lot of people are applying AI to perimeter problems, and we think that’s the wrong way to go about it. We need to attack these problems at the core, so we need to focus on the core, not the perimeter. That’s what our platform allows us to do.”
While Optura’s technology platform is complex “under the hood,” Hollis outlined the company’s focus on helping healthcare organizations identify where AI can have an impact and organize those ideas around the value that matters to them.
“We’re not selling an innovation theater. We’re not selling a point solution. We’re talking to them about what value is important to them. If it’s EBITDA, revenue growth; if it’s member satisfaction. , whatever their core value points are, configuring the system there and operating it. That’s the art of science and how to operate it. Through our platform, we’re helping them realize these ideas agentically.”
Optura provides a “single pane of glass” for executives to understand the health of AI programs across their organizations, he said.
“People are very excited about the AI opportunity, but they want to see and see quantitatively where AI will have an impact. That’s what we do as a platform, that’s what we do as a business,” Hollis said.
Over the past year, the startup has attracted significant attention from commercial health plans and providers, including Independent Blue Cross, Prime Therapeutics, and Ardent Health. Optura claims that over $2 billion of AI initiatives are currently running on its platform, with a trailing value of $120 million at a 700% AI return on investment for ongoing initiatives. The company has identified 250 new AI use cases.
“Optura has realized realized value faster than we expected,” Marty Bonick, president and chief executive officer of Ardent Health, told Fierce Healthcare. “Across marketing, contracts, and finance, we went from ideation to agent AI in days instead of months. That kind of speed and real accountability changes what is possible for health systems like ours.”
“Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to move beyond AI experimentation and achieve measurable business outcomes,” said Katie Thiry, Managing Director at Salesforce Ventures. We believe we are well-positioned to lead that change.”
The company’s early investors include several top health insurance executives, including Bruce Broussard, former CEO of Humana, Susan Diamond, former chief financial officer of Humana, and Mario Schlosser, co-founder, former CEO, and current chief technology officer of Oscar Health.
Investor Echo Health Ventures is a strategic venture capital firm that invests in medical innovation on behalf of Blue Cross Blue Shield plans.
“The question for health plans is no longer whether to invest in AI; it’s whether those investments are actually delivering better outcomes for members,” Michael Venera, executive vice president and chief strategy, technology and operations officer at Independence Blue Cross, said in a statement. “Optura answers that question for organizations like IBX, where every decision connects to the people they serve. Such accountability and visibility is not an option; it’s a way to ensure that AI creates real value where it matters most.”
Optura plans to use the new funding to invest in expanding its AI capabilities, growing its platform team, and expanding language model partnerships at scale.
“There are important conversations happening at both OpenAI and Anthropic as more platform features are aligned more strategically with models,” Hollis said.
Optura is also looking at opportunities to work with Salesforce. “We’re going to invest in some of our partner channel management and expand those capabilities and that team to take advantage of what’s in front of us,” he said.
Optura works with health plans and providers and has a clear view of how healthcare organizations are implementing AI. Despite the unique operating environments, Hollis noted that both provider and insurance organizations struggle to determine whether their AI investments are generating ROI.
“On the payer side, a lot of health plans like to build a lot of things, so there’s a lot of customization and a lot of tweaking and investments that have been made to maintain those customizations. There’s a lot of building capabilities in the health plan mindset, but on the provider side, it’s a lot less. They often buy off-the-shelf, and there’s more reliance on off-the-shelf providers, tools and tools that provide more point solutions,” Hollis said. “But every CFO has the same pain. My team wants to hire more people, they want to build more things, but some of them don’t know if what they’re doing is actually working. So I don’t invest anymore. The same goes for the CFO provider side. It’s the same on the CFO provider side, my team wants to buy more stuff. There’s a lot of stuff in our ecosystem, like going to conferences and building more stuff. I have teams swiping cards and coming back with agents that I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re working well together, and of course they don’t have the necessary security in place, and nothing related to ensuring ROI.”
He added, “We at Optura will be the catalyst for this activation, but we will do it with the planning and the ability to execute at scale so we can impact healthcare.”
