Healthcare IT & claims technology · Workers’ compensation

Brighterway

A Yale founded startup applying AI to the medical record review bottleneck in workers’ compensation and medical legal exams. It went through Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch with no named investor beyond YC and, as of September 2026, no public filing or clinical record to go with the product.

A broken ankle and an idle surgeon

In 2024, Walker Wells broke his ankle. While he was recovering, he talked with his orthopedic surgeon about the kind of case review work doctors call medical legal exams, the reports insurers and claims administrators order to settle workers’ compensation disputes. The surgeon told him he used to take those cases and had stopped, because reading through a patient’s full medical history, often thousands of pages scanned into disorganized PDFs, took too long to be worth his time. He said he would come back to it if the review process were faster. That conversation, described independently by a Y Combinator contact who watched the company launch and referenced in a separate write up of the founding story, became the origin story Wells and his Yale classmate Jason Apostol tell about Brighterway.

Thousands of pages, minutes to matter

Workers’ compensation claims run on paperwork. A physician asked to write a qualified medical evaluation or an independent medical exam report is handed a patient’s entire treatment history, often duplicated across providers and mostly unrelated to the injury at issue. According to an account posted by a person who watched Brighterway go through Y Combinator, only 10 to 15 percent of that material is typically relevant to a given specialty or claim. Physicians who read it all lose hours per case, and some, like Wells’s surgeon, stop taking the cases altogether.

Brighterway’s software ingests the PDFs, removes duplicate pages, and produces a specialty filtered summary that a physician can view next to the source document and edit directly, similar to working in a shared document. The company markets this to physicians and to the exam management companies that schedule them, though it has not named any of those companies in a source reviewed for this page.

Two Yale classmates

Wells and Apostol met during their first year at Yale and have worked on projects together since, according to an independent account of the company’s Y Combinator launch. Wells studied statistics and data science and had, before Brighterway, led a team of interns on a data tracking project at another startup; by his own account he also solo backpacked for five months at eighteen. Apostol studied computer science. Y Combinator’s company page credits Wells as Founder slash Chief Operating Officer. Wells’s own LinkedIn profile, in a version captured in January 2024, instead headlined him Co Founder and Chief Executive Officer. Neither page explains the difference, and no announcement naming a separate chief executive has surfaced in the sources reviewed here.

From demo day to a hiring push

Brighterway went through Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch. By early October 2024, Wells was posting that the company was hiring a founding full stack engineer and a founding machine learning engineer, describing Brighterway as venture backed and growing fast, with, in his words, a client base across multiple US cities. He did not name any of those clients in the post. A startup database that tracks hiring signals put Brighterway’s team at about 14 people as of 2026, though that figure comes from an aggregator, not from a disclosed headcount.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: Brighterway’s public record consists of a YC batch listing and directory style write ups, not the regulatory or funding filings that usually accompany a health tech startup at this stage. The operations claims, a growing client base and a team near 14 people, come from the founders and from aggregators, not from named customers or filed paperwork.

What to watch

• Whether Brighterway files a Form D or discloses funding beyond the reported Y Combinator investment.
• Whether it names a claims administrator, TPA, insurer or law firm as a customer.
• Whether Wells’s title is resolved as COO or CEO on the company’s own materials.
• Growth in team size and city coverage beyond the figures aggregators currently report.

In their words

Related companies

• Fairway Health: Also in Healthcare IT. An AI co-pilot that read a patient’s medical record and told a health insurer whether a treatment met its own coverage criteria
• Avelis Health: Also in Healthcare IT. A Y Combinator startup that started by fighting patients’ medical bills, then pivoted to auditing every claim for self-insured employers before the money moves
• Latent Health: Also in Healthcare IT. A San Francisco startup building AI agents that read a patient’s chart, assemble the paperwork insurers demand for expensive drugs, and file the request, so pharmacists
• Metriport: Also in Healthcare IT. An open source platform that pulls a patient’s scattered records out of the national health information networks and returns them as one structured file

Sources

1. CompanyBrighterway company pageY Combinator · accessed Sep 25, 2026
2. IndependentBrighterway: Improving Care in Workers’ CompensationHiretop, Daryna Falko · Jul 19, 2024
3. IndependentBrighterway, funding rounds and list of investorsTracxn · accessed Sep 2026
4. IndependentBrighterway funding, complete analysisExtruct AI · accessed Sep 2026
5. IndependentBrighterway startup profileReforgers · accessed Sep 2026
6. CompanyHi, we are hiring, LinkedIn postWalker Wells · Oct 2, 2024
7. IndependentCongrats to the Brighterway team, LinkedIn postSurbhi Sarna · Aug 30, 2024
8. IndependentWalker Wells LinkedIn profileLinkedIn, Internet Archive capture · Jan 2024
9. Public recordEDGAR full text search for “Brighterway”SEC · Sep 25, 2026
10. Public recordEDGAR company search for BrighterwaySEC · Sep 25, 2026
11. Public recordFDA, NIH, NSF, ClinicalTrials.gov and PubMed records check for BrighterwayHealthcare Discovery enrichment data · Sep 2026