Healthcare IT · Patient communication

Clarion

A New York startup building AI agents that answer the phone for clinics, then finish the task on the other end: booking, refills, referrals, billing questions, written back into the patient record.

Call Clare

Dial 415-534-9290 and an AI agent named Clare answers. That number sat at the bottom of the LinkedIn post Ryan Gallagher wrote on November 13, 2024, introducing Clarion to the world: “We’d love to show you what our platform can do. Call Clare, our AI agent.” The comments under that post are, by the account of the people who left them, mostly startled. One commenter wrote that calling the line was “amazingly seamless in terms of voice, clarity, communication, and specificity.”

What Clare does once she picks up is the unglamorous part of medicine that never makes it into a pitch deck about diagnosis or discovery: she books an appointment, moves one that needs to move, takes a prescription refill request, or routes a new referral toward a scheduled visit. Then she writes the result back into the clinic’s system of record, not a notepad by the phone.

The math behind a busy signal

Clarion’s own account of the problem is blunt: clinics miss 30 to 40 percent of their inbound calls. The company attributes this to staffing shortages, and the arithmetic is not hard to believe. A front desk has a fixed number of hands and an effectively unlimited stream of people who want to reschedule, ask about a bill, or find out whether a referral ever went through. Patient portals were supposed to absorb some of that volume. Gallagher, in the same launch post, said the portals have not worked as intended: “Despite the advent of patient portals, people still prefer calling and texting their doctor’s office.”

The tools clinics already had, in his telling, were not built to close the loop. “Existing solutions route conversations but don’t fully resolve them,” he wrote, drawing the line between older call-routing software and what Clarion is trying to build instead: something that finishes the task, not just forwards the call.

A physician who left the exam room

Gallagher trained at Stanford and completed his residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, according to his biography for the 2026 MGMA Annual Conference, where he is scheduled to speak on a panel about front-office AI for medical practices. He left clinical practice to build Clarion, the conference bio says, after seeing the administrative burden inside medicine firsthand. Before that, he was on the founding team at Two Chairs, a mental health care company, and worked in clinical strategy at Ophelia, a telehealth company for opioid use disorder recovery; both grew past $100 million valuations, according to a personal profile published on the blog No Cap. His earlier stops included Boston Consulting Group, Canaan Partners, RBC Capital Markets and a research stint at NASA Ames.

His co-founder, Jeffrey Lamothe, is described by Clarion and by Y Combinator as having built voice AI at Amazon Alexa, led AI and machine learning teams at Salesforce, and worked on enterprise AI at Citi. No source independent of the company or Lamothe’s own profile was found to confirm those specific roles.

From Anaphero to Clarion

The company did not start under this name. Y Combinator’s own listing for Clarion still carries an earlier company launch post for “Anaphero: Automating patient-facing tasks,” describing the same founders, the same problem, and nearly the same language Clarion uses today. A job-board post for a founding engineer role at Anaphero and a 2024 write-up on the accounting firm Fondo’s blog, titled “Anaphero Launches,” both describe the identical pitch. The scheduling and referral software company Healthie still lists its integration partner page at the web address harbor.gethealthie.com/partners/anaphero, even though the page itself now displays the name Clarion.

The rebrand appears to have landed around the November 2024 relaunch. In the comment thread under his LinkedIn post, Gallagher thanked a specific pair of collaborators: “Shoutout to Samuel Nudds and Friendly Studio for the awesome rebrand!” Anaphero went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch under Primary Partner Jared Friedman; by the time Gallagher wrote his launch post that November, the company was Clarion.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the parts of this story that can be checked against a filing, a registry or a lab record simply do not exist, because Clarion is a workflow and communication company, not a device or a drug. What can be checked, mostly, agrees on the shape of the business and disagrees on the size of it, especially the headcount and the funding total, which is covered on the companion funding page.

What to watch

• Whether the Seed round that closed on September 21, 2026 produces a public SEC filing, and whether it names investors beyond Accel and Y Combinator.
• Named clinic or health system customers, which have not surfaced in any source reviewed.
• Independent confirmation of the 80-plus EHR integration count and of Jeffrey Lamothe’s prior roles.
• Whether the team-size figure settles anywhere near the 6, 16 or 26 currently reported.

In their words

Related companies

• Aegis: Also in Healthcare IT. A three person Y Combinator startup building AI agents that detect denied health insurance claims, draft the appeal, and file it, aiming to turn a two hour manual task
• Memora Health: Also in Healthcare IT. A text messaging platform that automated patient follow up for Mayo Clinic, Penn Medicine and more than fifty other provider organizations
• 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
• Bunkerhill Health: Also in Healthcare IT. Nine FDA-cleared imaging and ECG algorithms, most built inside academic medical centers, wrapped in a platform that acts on what they find

Sources

1. IndependentClarion: The AI communication layer for healthcareY Combinator · company page, accessed Sep 2026
2. IndependentThe AlleyWatch Startup Daily Funding Report: 9/21/2026AlleyWatch · Sep 21, 2026
3. IndependentClarion Health 2026 Company Profile: Valuation, Funding and InvestorsPitchBook · accessed Sep 2026
4. IndependentClarion, 2026 Company Profile, Team, Funding and CompetitorsTracxn · captured Feb 12, 2025
5. IndependentClarion Health company profileBuilt In NYC · accessed Sep 2026
6. PartnerHealthie and Anaphero (Clarion) integration pageHealthie · archived Jul 22, 2025
7. CompanyToday I’m excited to introduce Clarion (launch post)Ryan Gallagher, MD, LinkedIn · Nov 13, 2024
8. IndependentRyan Gallagher, MD, speaker biography2026 MGMA Annual Conference · 2026
9. IndependentRyan Gallagher founder profileNo Cap · 2026
10. IndependentClarion, The AI That Answers Healthcare’s Phones (company dossier)YesPress · Jul 6, 2026
11. IndependentRyan Gallagher profile (Off The Record)YesPress · Jun 21, 2026
12. CompanyCompany pageClarion, clarionhealth.com · accessed Sep 2026
13. IndependentAnaphero Launches: Automating patient-facing tasks with AIFondo blog · Feb 9, 2026
14. Public recordEDGAR company search for "Clarion" and "Anaphero," form type DSEC · searched Sep 25, 2026