Healthcare IT · Revenue cycle automation

Arintra

Software that reads a finished patient chart and pushes billing codes straight into the claim, with no coder in between. Two AI PhDs started it after one of them opened a $19,000 emergency room bill. It now carries $51 million and a public list of health system customers.

The bill that started it

Preeti Bhargava spent about four hours in an emergency room. A month or so later a bill for $19,000 arrived. It was larger than her savings.

She did what almost nobody does. She went line by line, found coding errors, and argued each one. The total came down to $11,000. Insurance paid $7,000. She paid the rest.

Most people file that under bad luck. Bhargava and Nitesh Shroff, her co-founder, filed it under solvable. “Both Preeti and I are PhDs in AI,” Shroff said later on the BUILDERS podcast. “We just started putting our AI hat on it.”

Why coding is the chokepoint

Medical coding converts a physician’s note into the CPT, ICD-10, HCPCS and HCC codes a claim is built from. Nothing bills until it happens. Shroff calls it “a mandatory workflow in US healthcare,” and that shapes the business: Arintra is not selling a new capability, it is offering to take over one the hospital already pays for.

Three pressures have made hospitals listen. Certified coders are scarce, payer rules keep getting more intricate, and margins are thin enough that a slow accounts receivable cycle becomes a solvency question. “You cannot just throw in more and more people,” Shroff said. “It will not get solved.”

The older answer was computer-assisted coding, largely keyword matching with humans cleaning up the misses. Arintra pairs large language models with clinical knowledge graphs to read a chart in context, set the evaluation and management level, and write codes back into the health record with nobody retyping anything.

The category has reason to be careful. Coding decisions become claims to federal payers, and a systematic error becomes systematic overbilling. In June 2025 the law firm Tucker Ellis laid out the exposure: the Justice Department intervened in a case over an automated rule at University of Colorado Health that allegedly pushed emergency department encounters to the highest-level code, and it settled for $23 million. The alert reads the government position as blunt: “accountability for coding accuracy does not change just because a hospital system uses AI.” That is the category this product sits in. No allegation of that kind involving Arintra appears anywhere in the public record reviewed here.

Two researchers from College Park

Shroff holds a PhD from the University of Maryland and lists more than 30 patents and publications. Before Arintra he was an early engineer at Zoox, the self-driving company Amazon later bought, building perception models that had to read a stop sign correctly the first time.

Bhargava, also a Maryland PhD, was a data scientist at Demandbase, Samsung Research America and Xerox PARC, working on information extraction and large-scale modeling. She is CTO and lists more than 30 US patents.

Shroff draws the line between the two jobs directly. In a company post about his autonomous vehicle years he put the standard in six words: “You cannot afford to hallucinate here.” Every code the platform emits is meant to point back at the sentence that justifies it, inside the EHR.

Four years from batch to balance sheet

Arintra went through Y Combinator in Winter 2022 and took seed money through Peak XV’s Surge program. In December 2024 it announced an Epic Toolbox designation for fully autonomous coding, which matters more than it sounds: Epic is the gate most large US health systems buy through.

In February 2025 Mercyhealth, a $5 billion system across northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, went public as a customer. In August 2025 came a $21 million Series A led by Peak XV. A year later came $25 million more, led by Define Ventures, with the venture arms of Yale New Haven Health and Endeavor Health joining. Endeavor Health was a user before it was an investor, and backed both rounds.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the operational evidence is real and unusually specific for a company this young. A security certification, a KLAS report built on customer interviews, an Epic designation and health systems willing to put executives on the record are harder to manufacture than a press release. What is missing is the thing that matters most here. Every accuracy and revenue figure in circulation was measured by Arintra, on charts Arintra selected, by a method it has not published. When the output is a claim to a federal payer, the gap between a vendor-run accuracy study and an independent coding audit is the whole argument.

What to watch

• A published, independently run coding audit. Satisfaction and accuracy are different questions, and only the first has been surveyed.
• Whether KLAS re-rates with a larger sample. The current 93 carries a limited data flag and KLAS says such scores can move.
• How the upcoding question is handled as the platform expands into documentation improvement and denial appeals, where the incentive points toward higher-paying codes.
• A Form D from Arintra itself, or continued silence, which would indicate it keeps raising under Section 4(a)(2).
• Whether the competitive gap holds. Fathom scored 95.5 of 100 in the first KLAS autonomous coding report in Aug 2025 and took a CVS Health Ventures investment in May 2026.

In their words

Related companies

• Candid Health: Shared investor: First Round. Billing software built to get a medical claim right before it ever leaves the clinic, now sold to more than 200 provider organizations
• CombineHealth: Also in Healthcare IT. A Y Combinator backed startup selling AI agents, named Amy, Mark, Adam, Rachel and Taylor, that code, bill, chase denials and analyze claims for US health systems
• Knowtex: Also in Healthcare IT. An ambient AI platform that turns doctor patient conversations into notes, billing codes and orders
• Medplum: Also in Healthcare IT. An open source, FHIR native electronic health record that developers install instead of licensing

Sources

1. Public recordForm D, Gaingels Arintra LLC, CIK 0001990528SEC EDGAR · Aug 31, 2023
2. Public recordForm D, Gaingels Arintra 2025 LLC, CIK 0002077630SEC EDGAR · Jul 25, 2025
3. CertifierHITRUST e1 certificationArintra · Apr 17, 2026
4. IndependentArintra Autonomous Medical Coding 2026KLAS Research · Apr 23, 2026
5. IndependentArintra Raises $21M to Help Providers Win the Reimbursement FightMedCity News
6. IndependentArintra Secures $25M to Scale GenAI Autonomous Medical CodingHIT Consultant · Aug 24, 2026
7. IndependentMercyhealth transforms revenue cycle operationsHospital Management
8. Legal analysisAvoiding False Claims Act Landmines in AI-Assisted CodingTucker Ellis LLP · June 2025
9. IndependentFathom Secures Investment from CVS Health VenturesHIT Consultant
10. InterviewNitesh Shroff on BUILDERSFrontlines.io
11. DirectoryArintra page, Winter 2022 batchY Combinator
12. CompanyArintra Raises $25M, Series B releasePR Newswire · Aug 26, 2026
13. PartnerArintra now in Epic ToolboxBusiness Wire
14. CompanyArintra about page and homepagearintra.com