Healthcare IT · Clinical trial patient recruitment
HealthKey
An Austin startup that connects to a clinical trial site’s EHR and uses AI to prescreen existing patients against trial eligibility criteria. Y Combinator backed, launched publicly in February 2025, now selling into urology and multi-specialty research site networks.
The $1.4 million a urology practice never saw
In his Y Combinator launch post, Josh Sabol described a partner clinic: a urology practice with more than 10 locations and four research coordinators, each spending three hours every morning searching for trial candidates by hand in the practice’s EHR. The practice recruited for 11 clinical trials the year before. It missed its enrollment targets anyway, because the coordinators could not identify enough eligible patients in time. HealthKey put the cost of that gap at $1.4 million in missed revenue for a single clinic in a single year.
That gap is the company’s whole premise. Sponsors, the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies running trials, pay research sites a fee for every patient enrolled, commonly between $20,000 and $100,000 per patient according to the company. Finding out which of a site’s existing patients actually qualify is still mostly manual work: a coordinator searching charts for criteria as specific as, in the company’s own example, “Prostate cancer in T2c stage, 20-80 cc in size determined via MRI.” The launch post says a site sifting a list of 1,000 prostate cancer patients might find only about 5 who match every criterion.
How the prescreening works
HealthKey connects directly to a clinic’s electronic health record system, including scanned and faxed PDFs, and then runs each trial’s eligibility criteria against every patient’s history using AI. The company says it repeats this criterion by criterion, across every open trial a site is running, and returns a ranked list of likely candidates. A coordinator or physician then reviews each candidate in a dashboard, with the specific chart evidence, an MRI note, a lab value, an encounter record, that supports the match.
The pitch to a site is that it only pays when the system actually helps: the homepage advertises a success-fee model, $0 upfront, with onboarding through EHR integrations the company lists as including Athena, Veradigm Allscripts, Epic, NextGen and MedConnect. An independent review by The Rundown AI in August 2026 described the product plainly as “an active business-to-business platform that connects to a clinical site’s EHR and uses AI to prescreen patient records against clinical-trial inclusion and exclusion criteria,” and noted the vendor’s own case studies are “not independent validation of sensitivity, specificity, fairness, or performance on a new site’s population.”
The founder
Josh Sabol is HealthKey’s founder and CEO. By his own account on the YC company page, he was previously a product manager at AWS, working on automation for its roughly $20 billion supply chain, and before that the first product manager at Plate IQ, a B2B accounting and payments company from YC’s Summer 2015 batch that he says grew 10x during his tenure and later raised a $160 million Series B. Those details come from Sabol’s own bio, not independent confirmation. HealthKey went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch with Tom Blomfield as primary partner, and the YC page lists a team of 10 as of 2025.
Sourcing on the founding year is not fully consistent. Y Combinator’s company page and the company itself put HealthKey’s founding in 2025, matching its YC batch. A PitchBook company profile for the Austin, TX HealthKey lists 2023 as the year founded. No independent record resolves the difference.
Pre-seed money, then customers
A Delaware-registered special purpose vehicle named “HealthKey Pre Seed I Oct 2024, a Series of CGF2021 LLC” made its first sale on December 21, 2024, about seven weeks before HealthKey’s YC launch post. It filed a Form D with the SEC on January 6, 2025, reporting the entire $484,833 offering sold to 32 investors, administered by Sydecar LLC. That is roughly two months ahead of the public launch and consistent with an angel-and-syndicate round rather than an institutional lead; no lead investor is named in the filing. Aggregator profiles on PitchBook and VCbacked separately report about $500,000 in total funding for HealthKey, close to the SPV total.
Since then, the company has published a running series of customer case studies on its own blog rather than press releases. It names Flourish Research (a multi-site research network, cited for sites in Detroit and elsewhere), Access CCT, Tekton Research, US Urology Partners, Oregon Urology Institute and Urology Centers of Alabama as users, and ties specific deployments to sponsor trials for Alnylam, Eli Lilly, UCB, Johnson & Johnson, CG Oncology, Merck, Novartis and Valencia. These are company-published accounts; no independent reporting corroborating the individual case studies was found.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| SEC Form D, SPV | HealthKey Pre Seed I Oct 2024, a Series of CGF2021 LLC, CIK 0002050618. First sale Dec 21, 2024. $484,833 offered and sold in full to 32 investors, about $15,151 average. Rule 506(b) and Investment Company Act Section 3(c)(1). Administrator Sydecar LLC, signed by Brett Sagan. | Public record |
| HealthKey’s own EDGAR filings | An EDGAR company-name search for “healthkey” returns only the Sydecar SPV. No Form D under a “HealthKey, Inc.” issuer name was found as of Sep 25, 2026. | Not found |
| Founding year | Y Combinator’s company page and HealthKey both give 2025. A PitchBook profile for the Austin HealthKey gives 2023. | Differs from company |
| Named site customers | Flourish Research, Access CCT, Tekton Research, US Urology Partners, Oregon Urology Institute and Urology Centers of Alabama, each tied to a named sponsor trial in HealthKey’s own blog posts. | Company-stated |
| Screening volumes and outcomes | Company blog posts report figures such as 4.2 million medical records processed across four Flourish Research clinics for one trial, and 5.2 million records processed for Oregon Urology Institute, resulting in named counts of eligible or enrolled patients. | Company-stated |
| Independent tool review | The Rundown AI, an independent AI tools reviewer, described HealthKey as an active EHR-connected prescreening platform as of August 31, 2026, and flagged that the vendor’s case studies are not independent validation of accuracy. | Independent |
| FDA, NIH, NSF, registered trials | None found. HealthKey is a software workflow tool, not a regulated device, drug or biologic, so this is expected rather than a gap in the evidence. | Not applicable |
| Peer-reviewed publication | None found in PubMed searches for the company or product as of Sep 25, 2026. | Not found |
Read plainly: the SEC filing and the founder’s own YC page are the only records not authored by HealthKey. Everything about how well the prescreening actually performs, its accuracy, its false-negative rate, how it holds up across sites and populations, comes from the company’s own case studies. That does not make the case studies false. It means no outside party has yet checked them.
What to watch
- Whether HealthKey files a Form D under its own corporate name for a larger, institutionally led round.
- Any independent reporting or third-party study of prescreening accuracy, beyond the company’s own case studies.
- Resolution of the 2023 versus 2025 founding-year discrepancy.
- Whether named customers or sponsors confirm the relationships and figures described in HealthKey’s blog posts.
In their words
“Big Pharma pays a lot of money to clinics for each patient they enroll, but finding patients who qualify is an entirely manual process today.”
Josh Sabol, founder and CEO, Y Combinator launch post, Feb 2025 · Company-stated
“Doctors have to manually search through dense medical records looking for extremely specific criteria, for example: ‘Prostate cancer in T2c stage, 20-80 cc in size determined via MRI.’”
Josh Sabol, Y Combinator launch post, Feb 2025 · Company-stated
“Last year, they actively recruited for 11 clinical trials. They missed their enrollment targets because they couldn’t identify enough eligible patients, resulting in $1.4M in missed revenue.”
Josh Sabol, describing a partner urology practice, Y Combinator launch post, Feb 2025 · Company-stated
“Clinics only pay when they successfully identify qualified patients!”
HealthKey homepage, gethealthkey.com, accessed Sep 25, 2026 · Company-stated
“HealthKey is an active business-to-business platform that connects to a clinical site’s EHR and uses AI to prescreen patient records against clinical-trial inclusion and exclusion criteria.”
The Rundown AI, independent tool review, Aug 31, 2026 · Independent
“These are vendor-authored reports, not independent validation of sensitivity, specificity, fairness, or performance on a new site’s population.”
The Rundown AI, on HealthKey’s customer case studies, Aug 31, 2026 · Independent
“The active gethealthkey.com service is not a consumer health-record app and should not be confused with unrelated products using the HealthKey name on other domains.”
The Rundown AI, disambiguation note, Aug 31, 2026 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, HealthKey Pre Seed I Oct 2024, a Series of CGF2021 LLC, CIK 0002050618
- Public recordEDGAR company filing history for HealthKey Pre Seed I Oct 2024, a Series of CGF2021 LLC
- Public recordForm D filing summary, HealthKey Pre Seed I Oct 2024, a Series of CGF2021 LLC
- Public recordForm D filing detail, HealthKey Pre Seed I Oct 2024, a Series of CGF2021 LLC
- IndependentHealthKey: AI-powered Patient Identification for Clinical Trials, company page and launch post
- IndependentHealthKey (Medical Records Systems) company profile
- IndependentHealthKey Funding & Investors, Austin
- IndependentHealthKey Review: Clinical Trial AI & Pricing
- IndependentHealthKey company profile, London (Aviva Ventures backed employee health platform, unrelated company)
- IndependentLondon-based HealthKey secures 1.32 million euros to improve how employees access and pay for healthcare (unrelated company)
- CompanyHealthKey homepage
- CompanyHealthKey customer case studies, Josh Sabol author page
- CompanyHealthKey (YC W25) company page
- CompanyJosh Sabol personal site
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
