Health IT · Insurance eligibility
Sohar Health
An API that tells a behavioral health clinic, in about six seconds, whether a patient’s insurance will actually pay. Named customers, a $3.8 million seed, and accuracy figures only the company has measured.
The answer that was right and still wrong
A patient calls a virtual therapy practice. The intake team runs her details through an eligibility tool, which sends a standard X12 270 request to her insurer and gets a 271 response back. The response says she is covered.
Weeks later the claim is denied. Her employer plan had carved behavioral health out to a separate managed care company, and the payer that answered was never going to pay for therapy.
The distance between a technically correct answer and a useful one is what Sohar Health sells against. In its own account of the work it did for Tava Health, the company describes a starting state in which more than half of 270 and 271 responses were unusable, payers such as UMR produced frequent false negatives, and carve-out networks returned incomplete benefit details.
Why the standard check frays here
Eligibility verification is one of the oldest automated transactions in American healthcare. The 270 asks a payer whether a member is covered, and the 271 answers. Clearinghouses have moved those two messages for decades.
Behavioral health is where the format frays. Plans carve mental health and substance use benefits out to third party administrators or managed behavioral health organizations, so the name on the card is not the entity holding the risk. Copays differ by service code. Network status can differ by clinician rather than by practice.
Sohar put a number on that in its 2023 Y Combinator launch post: “Standard automated eligibility checks in the market can only achieve a 50 - 60% accuracy level for mental and behavioral health.” That is a company claim, and no independent measurement of it turned up.
The money at stake is easier to source. The 2025 funding release cites roughly $140 billion in unpaid US medical debt, an average of $118 to reprocess a denial, and nearly one in five claims denied on first submission.
A physician and the engineer who built the plumbing
Ashish Mandavia trained as a doctor in the UK National Health Service, moved into product work on emergency department triage software, then to Quit Genius, a digital clinic for substance addiction later renamed Pelago, where he ran commercial for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He then consulted on reimbursement at Simon-Kucher & Partners.
Lucas Gordon was employee one, chief technology officer and chief information security officer at the same company. His Y Combinator biography says he built integrations with more than 100 employers, including Evernorth, and led Quit Genius through SOC 2 audits and HITRUST certification.
UK records date what happened next precisely. Sohar Health Ltd was incorporated in England on April 27, 2023, with both men as directors and a statement of capital of one pound. Two months later the company was in Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 batch, running upwards of 60,000 eligibility checks a month and reporting $118,000 in annual recurring revenue booked across two months.
Four products and a list of names
The product line grew outward from the check itself. Verification returns real time eligibility and benefits. Discovery, launched April 24, 2025, identifies a patient’s insurer from four data points: first name, last name, date of birth and state. Network Status, launched May 28, 2025, answers whether a clinician is in network. Cost Estimate shows the patient a total before booking.
What separates Sohar from a database entry is that customers put their names to it. Talkiatry is the subject of a joint case study and an April 2025 announcement. Mindful Health Solutions issued its own release in November 2025 and Tava Health in January 2026. Rula and Innerwell supplied named executives in May 2025. In September 2025 Sohar hired a 21 year Optum veteran in X12 and 270 and 271 transactions to run product.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| UK corporate record | SOHAR HEALTH LTD, number 14830834, incorporated Apr 27, 2023 with capital of GBP 1. Directors Ashish Kumar Mandavia and Lucas Jeremy Gordon, no resignations. Micro company accounts for both years. DS01 filed Aug 8, 2025; dissolved by voluntary strike-off Nov 4, 2025. | Public record |
| SEC filings | No Form D on EDGAR under any Sohar entity, and a full text search returns zero documents, as of Sep 24, 2026. The seed was announced 18 months earlier. | Not found |
| Named customers | Talkiatry (Apr 2025), Mindful Health Solutions (Nov 2025) and Tava Health (Jan 2026) each appear in a dated announcement. Rula and Innerwell gave named executive quotes in May 2025. | Company and partner stated |
| Customer outcome figures | Talkiatry, 18% funnel conversion lift. Tava, 12% in about three weeks, intake failures at 6.5%, 5.83 second average response. Mindful Health Solutions, accuracy from a 72% July 2024 baseline to 90% by mid 2025 across more than 16,000 monthly appointments. | Company-stated |
| Accuracy claims | 99% for eligibility determination, 96% for benefits data, up to 60% discovery success against a stated 20% benchmark, and above 90% in press boilerplate. No third party audit or published method found. | Company-stated |
| Volume claims | The home page says more than 5 million checks a year. The Real-Time Eligibility page says over 4 million. Both accessed the same day. | Company figures differ |
| Security | A Jan 2025 post by the CTO states SOC 2 certification and HIPAA compliance. The auditing firm, report type and date are not named, and no HITRUST is claimed for Sohar itself. | Company-stated |
| Investor list | The company release names Kindred Capital, Y Combinator, Rebel Fund and Concept Ventures. HIT Consultant and HLTH name General Catalyst and Character instead. Bae HQ names NEA, Max Ventures and Coalition Operators, and a founder who appears nowhere else. | Reports disagree |
| Independent coverage | HIT Consultant, FinTech Global, Pulse 2.0 and HLTH covered the round and the launches, all tracking the releases closely. No benchmarking or investigative coverage found. | Independent |
Read plainly: the corporate and customer record is checkable, and the performance record is not. Five behavioral health organizations have attached their names and, in three cases, their own executives to the product, which beats a logo wall. Everything about how well the software works traces back to Sohar. The one figure a customer put in writing, Mindful Health Solutions moving from 72% to 90%, sits below the 96% and 99% the company markets, and it is the only number here with a stated before and after.
What to watch
- A Form D, or its continued absence. Eighteen months after the announcement there is nothing on EDGAR.
- Whether the US entity, which the UK strike-off implies is now the only one, ever files at a Series A.
- An independent accuracy benchmark from a payer, a customer or a reviewer.
- Named SOC 2 attestation details, and whether HITRUST follows given the CTO’s history with it.
- Whether customers keep signing their names. Three did in the nine months to January 2026.
In their words
“When people seek mental health support, knowing whether they are covered by insurance or not can be the difference between seeing a psychiatrist or giving up on finding treatment.”
Ashish Mandavia, MD, co-founder and CEO, HIT Consultant, 2025 · Independent
“In a world where people no longer carry physical credit cards, let alone their health insurance card, Sohar removes the friction from accessing care.”
Ashish Mandavia, Discovery launch release, 2025 · Company release
“Insurance verification is one of the most overlooked choke points in the revenue cycle, creating delays, denials, and massive inefficiencies for providers and patients alike”
Leila Zegna, Kindred Capital, in FinTech Global, 2025 · Investor
“Legacy EHR integrations often fall short when it comes to payer-specific eligibility logic”
Justin Hake, Mindful Health Solutions, 2025 · Customer
“What used to take hours, often requiring calls or portal logins, now happens in seconds.”
Rusty Leonard, Rula, 2025 · Customer
“Before Sohar, our RTE eligibility vendor lacked clean data and couldn’t support the complex payer networks and carve-outs common in behavioral health.”
Andrew Stein, Innerwell, 2025 · Customer
“Before partnering with Sohar, eligibility challenges were creating friction points for patients and forcing our teams to spend too much time troubleshooting avoidable issues”
Dallen Allred, Tava Health, 2026 · Customer
“Compliance isn’t just a checkbox for us”
Lucas Gordon, co-founder and CTO, company blog, 2025 · Company
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordSOHAR HEALTH LTD overview and officers, 14830834
- Public recordSOHAR HEALTH LTD filing history
- Not foundEDGAR company and full text search
- Not foundFDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH, NSF and PubMed searches
- IndependentSohar Health Raises $3.8M for AI-Driven Eligibility Verification
- IndependentSohar Health and Talkiatry Partner to Automate Insurance Verification
- IndependentSohar Health Launches Discovery AI Solution
- IndependentSohar Health raises $3.8m to streamline healthcare access
- IndependentSohar Health: $3.8 Million (Seed) Secured
- IndependentSohar Health Raises $3.8M for AI-Driven Eligibility Verification Platform
- DiffersSohar Health raises $3.8M for it’s AI-powered platform
- InvestorStreamlining Healthcare’s Front Door
- CompanySohar Health Lands $3.8M to Open the Front Door
- CompanySohar Health Launches Discovery
- CompanySohar Health Unveils Network Status Tool
- CompanySohar Health Adds Key Talent to Power Innovation in Patient Intake
- PartnerMindful Health Solutions Advances Patient Experience
- PartnerSohar Health and Tava Health Partnership
- CompanyY Combinator company page and Launch YC post
- CompanySecurity, Privacy, and Compliance at Sohar
- CompanyHome, About, Real-Time Eligibility and customer case studies
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
