Healthcare IT · Provider credentialing and revenue cycle

Harbera

AI software that watches the credentialing status of physicians, dentists and nurse practitioners so they do not quietly fall out of network. Two Harvard classmates launched it from Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, then widened the pitch to fee schedule automation within a year.

A status that quietly expires

Every physician, dentist and nurse practitioner in the country carries a credentialing file: licenses, board certifications, malpractice history, and a contract with each insurance plan that agrees to pay for their care. None of it is permanent. Licenses lapse. Insurers change their rules. Contracts need renewing on a schedule that nobody in a busy clinic is watching closely.

Harbera’s founders put a number on how big that tracking job gets. “A telehealth company that accepts 10 insurance plans and works with 100 therapists across 30 states needs to track up to 30,000 statuses,” they wrote in their Y Combinator launch post. A 200-dentist dental group, they said, needs to track 8,000 statuses of its own, because dentists carry contracts with more than 40 insurance plans on average.

Miss one of those statuses and a provider can fall out-of-network without anyone noticing until a claim comes back denied. “If a provider falls out-of-network, it can take months to get credentialed again,” the founders wrote. In the meantime, patients get rerouted and the clinic stops getting paid for that provider’s work.

The paperwork behind the paperwork

There are more than 900 insurance companies operating across the United States, each with its own and frequently changing credentialing requirements, according to Harbera’s launch post. Many back-office teams still track all of it with spreadsheets, filing cabinets, or a repurposed Salesforce instance never built for the job.

Y Combinator’s own announcement of the company put a dollar figure on the stakes: “Delays in credentialing can cost healthcare organizations $100k in lost revenue per doctor per month.” That is the number Harbera is selling against, whether or not it holds for every practice.

Two Harvard classmates

Veronica Nutting and Sophia Clark built Harbera together after years as friends. “We’re best friends from college. We studied and taught Computer Science together at Harvard,” the two wrote in their launch post. Nutting had worked as a software engineer at Stripe. Clark had worked as a software engineer at House Rx, a specialty pharmacy software startup that serves clinics nationally.

Y Combinator’s own company directory lists the pair as Harbera’s active founders, with the company’s primary YC partner recorded as Gustaf Alstromer. A job listing for an AI Engineering and Operations Intern job listing later appeared on Harvard’s Crimson Careers site, a sign the founders were still hiring out of their own alumni network, though the posting has since expired.

From a two-line pitch to six products

Harbera launched publicly through Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, with a company page dated to Y Combinator’s own records around February 18, 2025, and a promotional post from Y Combinator’s X account on February 28, 2025. At launch the team was two people and the pitch was narrow: continuous credentialing monitoring for hospitals, clinic groups, dental support organizations and telehealth companies.

By the time Harbera’s own website was captured in 2026, the pitch had grown. The homepage now advertises “Automate fee schedule work and credentialing workflows in one AI-native revenue cycle platform,” organized into six products spanning document ingestion, payer enrollment prep, visibility and reporting, communications, fee schedule automation, and delegated credentialing. The company now describes itself as building for “revenue cycle teams,” a wider category than the credentialing-only pitch of the launch post.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the parts of Harbera’s story that come from Y Combinator itself, batch membership, founder names, launch date, hold up. Almost everything past that, headquarters city, funding amount, investor list, customer counts, comes from either the company’s own site or from data aggregators that contradict each other and do not cite a primary source. Nothing here should be read as confirmed funding until a filing or a named investor says so directly.

What to watch

• Whether a Form D or a press release ever confirms the $500,000 figure that funding aggregators currently disagree on.
• Whether Harbera settles its own headquarters city, New York City per Y Combinator versus San Francisco per several funding trackers.
• Named clinic, hospital or DSO customers behind the “1,100+ clinics” figure on the company site.
• Whether Harbera pursues or already holds NCQA CVO certification, relevant to any delegated credentialing work it takes on.
• Independent press coverage, which has not appeared as of this writing.

In their words

Related companies

• Candid Health: Also in Healthcare IT. Billing software built to get a medical claim right before it ever leaves the clinic, now sold to more than 200 provider organizations
• Denta: Also in Healthcare IT. A one person Y Combinator company that set out to automate the back office of a dental practice, then repositioned itself within weeks of its public launch as a full
• LunaBill: Also in Healthcare IT. AI voice agents that call insurance companies on a hospital's behalf, chasing unpaid claims the way a biller would, around the clock
• 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

Sources

1. IndependentHarbera company profile and launch postY Combinator · Feb 2025
2. IndependentHarbera (@withharbera) uses AI to make credentialing easy for hospitals and clinic groupsY Combinator on X · Feb 28, 2025
3. CompanyHarbera company websiteHarbera · accessed Sep 25, 2026
4. CompanyHarbera FAQ pageHarbera · accessed Sep 25, 2026
5. IndependentAI Engineering and Operations Intern, job listing for HarberaHarvard Crimson Careers · expired, archived Sep 2026
6. IndependentHarbera funding, investors and team profileFundedIQ · accessed Sep 25, 2026
7. IndependentHarbera funding and investors profileVCBacked · accessed Sep 25, 2026
8. IndependentHarbera company profileGetLatka · accessed Sep 25, 2026
9. IndependentHarbera funding rounds and investorsTracxn · accessed Sep 25, 2026
10. IndependentHarbera funding, team and investors profileStartup Intros · accessed Sep 25, 2026
11. Public recordEDGAR full text search results for “Harbera”SEC · accessed Sep 25, 2026