Healthcare IT · AI care coordination
Careforce
Autonomous AI agents that phone Medicaid members and clinic patients in their own language and book them in. Live inside California safety net health plans, with named customers and published outcome numbers, and no SEC funding record of its own.
The call from Angelica
Vanessa Barahona was working her office cleaning job in Bakersfield last spring when her phone rang. The caller said she was Angelica, from Kern Family Health Care, and that it was time to renew her Medi-Cal coverage. Barahona, 41, had the packet at home, unopened.
Angelica booked her an in person appointment. When the job got in the way, Angelica moved it. The paperwork went in late, but early enough that coverage never lapsed.
“It was easy. The fact that Angelica spoke Spanish when we were on the phone made it better,” Barahona told KFF Health News through a translator. “It felt like I was talking to a real person.”
She was not. Angelica is software, sold to Kern Family by a San Francisco startup called Careforce.
The paperwork problem
About 52 percent of Kern County residents rely on Medi-Cal, one of the highest rates in California. Through the pandemic, relaxed federal rules let most of them renew without doing anything: Kern Family’s chief information officer put the automatic share at 70 percent a year. On July 1, 2025, that ended.
What follows is rarely a finding that someone is ineligible. It is a missed deadline, an unreturned form, an old address. A review of California’s unwinding found 66 percent of the roughly two million disenrollments were procedural.
The rules get harder. Under the 2025 budget law, most adults who gained Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act expansion must document at least 80 hours a month of work, school, training or community service, applied at the first renewal after January 1, 2027, and most enrollees will renew twice a year instead of once. That is a call center problem before it is a policy problem, and plans do not have the staff.
The founder
Huzaifa Sial was born in Pakistan, raised in Nepal and educated in Canada. He took a master’s in clinical informatics at Northwestern, then built AI systems at UnitedHealth Group and Optum: risk scoring, disease prediction, patient engagement models. His own profile claims 14 years in healthcare AI, four health AI patents and two exits, all company-stated and unconfirmed by any record found here.
What he says he learned inside the payers was that modeling was never the constraint. “Health plans use math and science to figure out how to provide care, but the problem is that many people never even come in to receive care,” he told the California Health Care Foundation.
The company entered Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch as Helpcare AI and relaunched as Careforce. CRV dates the founding to October 2024 and its own investment to November 2024. Team size on the YC profile is nine.
What the agents do
Angelica calls, texts, emails and schedules. David works internally, pulling data out of electronic medical records and payer portals to build a list worth calling. Neither requires an integration: the agents drive the same web interfaces staff already use, which is why deployments take weeks rather than months.
At Kern Family, Angelica starts three months before benefits expire, asks what has changed in a household, points people at the right form, and hands off to a human when it cannot answer. It runs at all hours. The plan has since pointed it at labs, annual visits, screenings and ride booking.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Paying customer | Kern Family Health Care, the largest Medi-Cal plan in Kern County, has spent about $370,000 on Careforce software (KFF Health News, Aug 4, 2026). | Independent |
| Scale of use | KFF: more than 800,000 calls to 387,000 members since late 2025, against a plan estimate of $2.4 million in staffing, or 40 full time employees. CHCF, three weeks earlier: more than 1.2 million calls, 270,000 enrollees, over half in Spanish. | Accounts differ |
| Renewal outcome | CHCF: 96 percent renewed in the first year against 38 percent before. KFF: 94.9 percent in April, against roughly 40 percent once pandemic auto renewal was cut in half. Same plan, two write ups, different baselines. | Accounts differ |
| Clinical outcome | Ritter Center, a federally qualified health center in San Rafael serving unhoused patients, used Angelica for hypertension outreach. CHCF reports 73 percent reached blood pressure control against 62 percent the prior year. | Independent |
| Outside money | CHCF says its Innovation Fund invested $500,000 and that plans and clinics in five counties use the platform, including the Central California Alliance for Health and Kern County Public Health. | Funder-stated |
| SEC record | None for this company. EDGAR returns one Form D under the name Careforce Inc. (CIK 0002095881, Nov 7, 2025), but that issuer sits in Hayward, was signed by a chief executive named Benjamin Kuhn, and lists directors Ashish Singh and Or Perluk. Tracxn describes the same $2,676,790 raise as an in home care provider for seniors. | Name collision |
| Capital totals | PitchBook lists three investors, Y Combinator, CHCF and CRV, and $500,000 raised to date. The YC standard deal is $500,000 by itself and CHCF added $500,000, so the total does not reconcile. | Aggregator |
| Security posture | CHCF describes Angelica as using “a HIPAA-compliant platform” to reach enrollee data. No SOC 2 report, HITRUST certification or published attestation was found. | Not found |
| Performance claims | An 80 percent conversation to booking close rate, 30 percent more appointments, 100 calls a minute, 29 languages. All company figures. Reporters who heard recordings describe more than 30 languages and note that cross talk sometimes made the program pause. | Company-stated |
| Regulated evidence | No FDA clearance, no registered trial, no NIH or NSF award, no PubMed publication naming the company. | Not found |
Read plainly: the operational evidence is unusually good for a company this young. Two independent outlets, one of them a foundation that also wrote a check, name the customers, the dollars and the outcomes, and a reporter listened to recordings of the calls. What is thin sits downstream of the anecdote. The two accounts of the same deployment disagree on membership, call volume and baseline by wide margins, so nobody outside the plan has audited the numbers. The capital picture is close to invisible: no Regulation D filing, one aggregator total that does not add up, and a same name issuer in the next county whose filing is easy to mistake for this one.
What to watch
- Consent. On February 8, 2024 the FCC ruled that AI generated voices count as “artificial” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, so calls using them need prior express consent. A plan calling its own members about their own coverage sits on firmer ground than cold outreach, but the exposure is real and it is priced per call.
- Whether a Form D ever appears under Careforce or Helpcare AI. None exists as of September 22, 2026.
- January 1, 2027, when work documentation starts biting at the first renewal. That is the event the California pitch is aimed at.
- Audited numbers. The 96 percent and the 94.9 percent both come from the plan, not from a regulator.
- Competition. Assort Health raised a $120 million Series C in June 2026 at unicorn valuation. Careforce sells into safety net budgets against far deeper capital.
In their words
“It was easy. The fact that Angelica spoke Spanish when we were on the phone made it better,”
Vanessa Barahona, Medi-Cal member, KFF Health News, 2026 · Independent
“Most people don’t know what they need, and if they do, they have a hard time getting there,”
Huzaifa Sial, founder and CEO, KFF Health News, 2026 · Independent
“It’s almost unheard of to reach such a high renewal rate for Medi-Cal plans,”
Cesar Delgado, CIO, Kern Family Health Care, CHCF, 2026 · Independent
“People called and wanted to speak to Angelica because she was so helpful,”
Cesar Delgado, CHCF, 2026 · Independent
“But we are already stretched thin. We need this functionality to be much more effective and augment our efforts.”
Emily Duran, CEO, Kern Health Services, KFF Health News, 2026 · Independent
“When you have a new technology like this, you need to police it,”
Mark Duggan, economics professor, Stanford University, KFF Health News, 2026 · Independent
“Careforce is one of the first companies building AI agents for safety net organizations,”
Stella Tran, CHCF Innovation Fund, 2026 · Funder
“We built Careforce to acknowledge reality: systems remain unintegrated. Our agents navigate the messy present rather than demanding infrastructure overhauls.”
Huzaifa Sial, company press release, March 2026 · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- IndependentAI Is Being Used to Boost Medicaid Enrollment, but Not Without Concerns
- IndependentHow AI-Powered Outreach Is Helping Californians Keep Their Medi-Cal Coverage
- IndependentA California Medicaid Plan Is Using AI Voice Agents
- Public recordDeclaratory Ruling FCC 24-17, docket 23-362, AI voices under the TCPA
- Public recordForm D, Careforce Inc., CIK 0002095881, a separate Hayward issuer
- Public recordThe Y Combinator Standard Deal
- IndependentAssort Health scores $120M series C
- IndependentHelpcare AI company profile, investors and funding
- IndependentCareforce company profile and funding record
- IndependentCareforce portfolio entry, founded and partnered 2024
- CompanyCareforce company page, launch post, jobs and team size
- CompanyCareforce Introduces Autonomous AI Agents
- CompanyHow Careforce’s Founder Huzaifa Sial Is Rebuilding Healthcare
- CompanyCareforce website, LinkedIn page and founder profile
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
