Healthcare IT · Prior authorization automation

Lamar Health

A San Francisco startup that builds AI software to automate the referral, benefits verification and prior authorization paperwork behind expensive specialty drugs. Founded in 2022, it now sells to specialty pharmacies and infusion clinics and says it has processed billions of dollars in prior authorization drug costs.

Paperwork that keeps patients waiting

Lamar Health sells to a narrow, painful part of healthcare operations: the fax machines, portals and phone trees that stand between a doctor's prescription for a specialty drug and a patient actually getting it. On its Y Combinator page, the company puts the scale of the problem in dollar terms: the drugs it deals with cost about $70,000 per patient per year, and patients who need them within days often wait weeks because of manual workflows built around poor data standards.

The company's own one line description of that workflow, printed on its Y Combinator page, uses a profanity to describe the paperwork. The page does not soften the point: this is drudgery, and Lamar Health is trying to sell software that takes it off a pharmacy's desk.

The problem: prior authorization as a bottleneck

Specialty pharmacies, infusion clinics and hospitals that dispense high-cost drugs have to clear a prior authorization before insurance will pay. According to Lamar Health's own site, the average denial rate on those authorizations runs above 30 percent, more than half of which the company calls preventable, and a specialty medication authorization can take more than 30 minutes of staff time to prepare. The company says intake alone eats more than 5 minutes per patient, at a time when pharmacy staff turnover is running high.

Lamar Health's pitch is that its software centralizes referrals from fax, EHRs, portals and email, checks insurance eligibility and expected patient costs before work begins, flags missing documentation and incorrect diagnosis codes, then auto fills payer forms and tracks submissions through to a final determination. The company describes this as sitting on top of existing systems, including CoverMyMeds, rather than replacing them.

Founders

Lamar Health's CEO is Eesha Sharma, who holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. Her LinkedIn profile lists doctoral work and publications in molecular genetics and RNA biology, including a co-first author paper on global mapping of human RNA to RNA interactions in Molecular Cell, work on CRISPR-based diagnostics for SARS-CoV-2 published in PNAS, and a semifinalist run in the XPrize Rapid COVID Diagnostic competition. She also holds several filed patents on nucleic acid detection and RNA stability systems. Y Combinator's company page, in its own words, credits her with prior work consulting for government and biotech clients on precision medicine and AI, including an AI model used to optimize the COVID era Pfizer vaccine and a model for DNA energy hybridization; those specific claims come from the company's own profile and have not been independently verified.

One data aggregator, Tracxn, lists a second co-founder, Serhiy Shekhovtsov, and dates the company's founding to 2020 in Palo Alto rather than 2022 in San Francisco. Y Combinator's own company page names only Sharma as an active founder and lists 2022 as the founding year. No independent reporting confirms a second co-founder or the earlier founding date, so that claim is treated here as unverified.

From accelerator to named customers

Lamar Health went through Y Combinator, which lists the company's batch as Winter 2021 even though the company itself, Y Combinator's own founding field, GetLatka and LinkedIn all give 2022 as the founding year. That gap between the batch label and the founding date is unresolved in the public record.

By March 2025, the company had a named customer relationship confirmed by independent trade press: MobiHealthNews reported that Uptiv Health, an infusion and chronic care management company, partnered with Lamar Health to automate referral intake and prior authorization. Uptiv's CEO, Torben Nielsen, was quoted saying the partnership let his company move resources away from administrative burden. Lamar Health's own case studies page separately names CloudRx, which it describes as a nationwide specialty pharmacy hub handling fertility medication prior authorizations at 8,000 patients per month, as a customer; that relationship is company-stated and has not been confirmed by outside reporting.

In an August 2026 LinkedIn post, the company said it had helped process and automate more than $4.3 billion in prior authorization drug costs for pharmacy and infusion operations teams, saving more than 2 million staff hours. GetLatka separately estimated the company's 2024 revenue at about $900,000, a figure it labels as an estimate rather than a disclosed number.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: Lamar Health has a real, independently confirmed customer in Uptiv Health and a plausible story about a painful, well documented operational problem in specialty pharmacy. What it does not have is a public paper trail of its own: no Form D on EDGAR, no consistent funding total across the data aggregators that track it, and no independent verification of its largest reported numbers, including the $4.3 billion processing claim and the CloudRx case study.

What to watch

• Whether the company files a Form D for its December 2024 seed round or any later raise.
• Named customers beyond Uptiv Health and CloudRx, and any third party confirmation of the CloudRx numbers.
• Whether the founding year and YC batch discrepancy gets resolved, or whether a second co-founder is independently confirmed.
• Revenue disclosures beyond GetLatka's 2024 estimate.

In their words

Related companies

• 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
• 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
• One Codex: Also in Healthcare IT. A cloud platform that takes a raw sequencing file and names the microbes inside it
• Delfino AI: Also in Healthcare IT. A voice AI platform that places the phone calls a provider’s office has to make to a health insurer: benefit checks, prior authorization status, claim follow up

Sources

1. Public recordSEC EDGAR full text search, “Lamar Health,” Form DSEC EDGAR
2. Public recordLamar Health company profileY Combinator
3. IndependentUptiv Health partners with Lamar Health to expand AI automationMobiHealthNews, Anthony Vecchione · Mar 26, 2025
4. IndependentLamar Health company profilePitchBook · accessed 2026
5. IndependentLamar Health company profileCB Insights · accessed 2026
6. IndependentLamar Health company profileTracxn · accessed 2026
7. IndependentLamar Health revenue estimateGetLatka · accessed Sep 2026
8. IndependentEesha Sharma professional profileLinkedIn · accessed 2026
9. CompanyLamar Health homepagelamarhealth.com · accessed Feb 2026
10. CompanyAbout Lamar Healthlamarhealth.com/company/about
11. CompanyLamar Health case studies page, CloudRxlamarhealth.com/case-studies
12. CompanyLamar Health pricing pagelamarhealth.com/product-features/pricing
13. CompanyLamar Health company pageLinkedIn · accessed Aug 2026