Healthcare IT · Referral management
Locata
A Y Combinator company automating prior authorizations, patient follow up and consult note retrieval for primary care and community health centers. Founded in 2025, it has one named milestone: a first health center customer signed within two weeks of building the product.
Two weeks to a first customer
Locata’s own account of its start is brief and specific. The company says that within two weeks of building its product it signed “a major regional health center” and had it live on the platform. By the company’s telling, that first deployment saved the clinic’s staff more than 100 hours of work in its first month.
The clinic is not named, and no independent account of the deployment has been found. The claim comes from Locata’s own Y Combinator company profile and its own launch post, repeated word for word in both places.
The referral gap
Locata frames its market around a single statistic: of more than 100 million specialist referrals issued in the US each year, the company says only about half are actually completed. Its pitch is that primary care back offices are understaffed and overwhelmed by the administrative side of referrals, from checking prior authorization rules to chasing consult notes, and that the gap between a referral being issued and a patient actually being seen is where care falls through.
The product Locata describes covers that whole chain. It says its AI extracts patient data from electronic health records, maps it to the right prior authorization forms for different payer portals, submits the requests, and then tracks their status automatically, flagging staff only when a case needs a human. A voice AI calls patients on a set schedule to check whether they have booked or kept a specialist appointment. Once a visit happens, the system is supposed to contact the specialist’s office to request the consult note and route it back into the clinic’s record system, closing the loop.
Two Stanford engineers
Alejandro Salinas and Joshua Chang, who go by Josh, say they met at Stanford, where both earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science. Locata’s own materials say Salinas was a senior software engineer at Meta’s Reality Labs, where he led development of AI features for wearable products, and that before that he did AI research at Stanford Medicine as an undergraduate and shadowed doctors during summers, having once been on a pre-med track. Chang, per the same materials, holds a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford specializing in AI and worked as a software engineer at Google on AI products the company says served over a billion users. A separate company listing states the two have known each other for almost 10 years. Both are listed as co-founder and co-CEO on Locata’s own site.
No independent biography, resume database or news profile confirming these employment details has been found. They are Locata’s own account of its founders.
From stealth to Y Combinator
An automated startup-tracking account on X posted on October 7, 2025 that Salinas had come out of “stealth mode” to debut Locata, linking to locatahealth.com. Y Combinator’s own site lists Locata as an active company in its Summer 2025 batch, with a company launch post on the Y Combinator site. The exact date Locata joined Y Combinator has not been independently confirmed beyond the batch label itself.
Locata’s about page says the company is “backed by leading Silicon Valley investors,” without naming any of them or disclosing an amount raised. No SEC Form D notice, press release with a dollar figure, or named investor has been found to support that statement.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA records | No 510(k) or PMA filings found under Locata in FDA databases as of Sep 25, 2026. Consistent with a workflow product rather than a diagnostic or therapeutic device. | Not found |
| Registered trials | No entries found in a ClinicalTrials.gov search for Locata as of Sep 25, 2026. | Not found |
| Federal grants | No NIH RePORTER or NSF award records found under Locata as of Sep 25, 2026. | Not found |
| Peer-reviewed literature | No PubMed entries found for Locata as of Sep 25, 2026. | Not found |
| Outside funding | The company says it is “backed by leading Silicon Valley investors,” but no SEC Form D, funding announcement with a dollar amount, or named investor was found in an EDGAR company and full text search or in press coverage. | Differs from the record |
| Y Combinator batch | Listed as an active company in the Summer 2025 batch on Y Combinator’s own site, with a company launch post published there. | YC data |
| Customer traction | Company says it signed “a major regional health center” within two weeks of building the product and saved it more than 100 hours of staff work in the first month live. The clinic is not named. | Company-stated |
| Efficacy metrics | Company site lists an 85 percent reduction in staff workflow, 3.4x faster prior authorization submission and a 2.2x increase in patient touchpoints, with no named customer, sample size or methodology disclosed. | Company-stated |
Read plainly: everything specific about Locata, from its founders’ resumes to its one customer story to its efficacy numbers, comes from the company itself. That is normal for a startup a few months past a stealth debut. What is missing is any outside confirmation, a named clinic, a filed funding round, a reporter who called the company, or a partner who spoke on the record.
What to watch
- Whether Locata names the “major regional health center” it says it signed, or any customer that follows it.
- A first SEC Form D or a funding announcement with a disclosed amount and named investors, which would substantiate the “backed by leading Silicon Valley investors” claim.
- Independent reporting from a healthcare trade outlet or local business press, which has not yet appeared.
- Any published data behind the 85 percent, 3.4x and 2.2x figures on the company site.
In their words
“Within two weeks of building our product, we signed a major regional health center and have saved them over 100 hours of work in our first month live.”
Locata, Y Combinator company profile, 2025 · Company-stated
“Referral management is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone tasks in healthcare.”
Alejandro Salinas and Joshua Chang, Y Combinator launch post, 2025 · Company-stated
“Imagine having a team of the world’s best referral coordinators that operate with higher accuracy, lower costs, and faster delivery, giving health centers the capacity to scale on demand and close more referral loops.”
Alejandro Salinas and Joshua Chang, Y Combinator launch post, 2025 · Company-stated
“We started with a simple belief: gaps in care should never happen.”
Locata, company website, accessed Sep 25, 2026 · Company-stated
“Backed by leading Silicon Valley investors, we’re building Locata to solve healthcare’s most complex operational challenges.”
Locata, company website, accessed Sep 25, 2026 · Company-stated
“Medi-Cal funding cuts are creating real uncertainty for clinics, and yet the response wasn't despair. It was pragmatism.”
Locata, LinkedIn company page, 2026 · Company-stated
“At Locata, that's exactly the problem we wake up trying to solve every day.”
Locata, LinkedIn company page, 2026 · Company-stated
Related companies
Sources
- YC dataLocata: AI Referral Automation for Primary Care Clinics
- YC dataLaunch YC: Locata, AI Referral Management for Health Centers
- CompanyLocata homepage
- CompanyLocata, About Us
- CompanyLocata company page post on the CCALAC Health Care Symposium
- AggregatorLocata, Funding, Team and Investors
- AggregatorLocata AI, Inc. company profile
- IndependentStealth Startup Spy post on Alejandro Salinas and Locata
- Public recordEDGAR company search for “Locata”, all form types
- Public recordEDGAR full text search for “Locata” in Form D filings
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
