Investing in Assort: Building the Agentic AI Operating System for Patient Engagement

U.S. healthcare faces a front-office and patient access crisis. Physician groups and health systems handle an enormous amount of patient calls every year, yet many go unanswered or abandoned. Patients are often matched with the wrong provider, scheduled without the right prep, or left waiting weeks for appointments. Meanwhile, practices spend billions annually on receptionists and call centers, creating high costs but little improvement in access or experience.

For decades, the default solution was labor: larger front-desk teams, outsourced call centers, and endless manual workflows. Today, with persistent staff shortages, rising costs, and advances in generative AI, a new model is possible — one that automates patient access with speed, accuracy, and scale.

That’s why Lightspeed is thrilled to announce our investment in Assort Health, the agentic AI platform that is quickly becoming a go-to choice for provider organizations looking to reimagine patient access.

A differentiated product, built for healthcare

Assort today can replace phone, SMS, and web patient interactions with AI agents that schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, report lab results, and most other patient-facing workflows. The platform’s proprietary technology is able to automate notoriously difficult workflows that have been left behind by technology, stuck in faxes, binders, decision trees, and spreadsheets, despite voice AI and LLMs being available for a few years now. Customer feedback shows patients actually prefer the experience, with Assort’s AI achieving scores over 4.6/5 to 3.9/5 for human operators.

What sets Assort apart is its ability to go deep. The system supports more than 1.2M configurable workflows and integrates directly with most major EHRs. Each deployment translates binder-based, specialty-specific rules and provides historical visit history, call recordings, and publicly available data on the practice into structured workflows, creating deeply embedded efficiencies specific to each practice and a growing dataset of 42M patient interactions that improve the product with every call.

Assort’s data reflects that customers consistently validate this differentiation. One orthopedic group eliminated half a million dollars of front-desk spend while doubling show rates. Another multispecialty practice saw abandonment rates fall from 40% to 6% in weeks. As one IT director told us: “The other vendors could demo something, but they broke under our complexity. Assort scaled cleanly — that’s why we chose them.”

Founders who blend healthcare and AI

Healthcare is hard, and it takes founders with a combination of near-contradictory traits whose combination is rare and powerful. We believe Co-founders and Co-CEOs Jon Wang and Jeff Liu bring together a unique convergence of AI-native roots, both brain tissue and healthy scar tissue earned in prior healthcare roles, clarity of thought on vision, and a simultaneous maniacal attention to detail. They achieve top-tier product and commercial velocity today, while exercising a delayed gratification mindset on long-run objectives.

These traits, combined with Jon’s extensive record of excellence in medicine and computer science at Stanford and UCSF, and Jeff’s high-velocity technical experience at Athelas and Facebook, were evident throughout our time together and the many reflections from customers and those they’ve worked with. Together, Jon and Jeff have assembled a high-velocity, AI-native team that has and continues to attract top talent across engineering, sales, and customer success. They’ve paired deep technical insight with on-the-ground healthcare knowledge, earning trust from physicians, administrators, and patients alike.

The Assort flywheel and long-term vision

What makes Assort exemplary is that adoption compounds with scale. Each call handled trains the system across edge cases, each new workflow automated makes deployments faster, and each EHR integration lowers friction for future customers. This creates a self-reinforcing flywheel: more usage → higher quality → broader adoption → deeper integration.

Assort has already become one of the leading vendors for physician groups. But the vision doesn’t stop there. The platform is rapidly expanding toward a patient-centered operating system for a patient experience platform that automates the full patient journey from intake to follow-up and billing — allowing practices to layer on hundreds of thousands of agentic automations to provide the best possible patient experience.

Why now, why Assort, why Lightspeed

The timing is clear. An $80-100B labor market in healthcare front offices is under strain, while generative AI has reached maturity to handle patient interactions with reliability and empathy. Among vendors in this space, Assort has emerged as a go-to choice: we believe they are the only player that combines deep specialty workflow coverage, multi-EHR integration, fast deployments, and the leading AI-native team in the category.

At Lightspeed, we’ve seen how quickly adoption of AI in healthcare can scale when it addresses acute pain points, most recently through our partnership with other leading health technology companies. Assort is among the companies leading the charge in re-platforming the category of patient engagement into the AI era beginning with voice AI.

We recently attended Assort Ascend, Assort’s inaugural customer conference, and viscerally felt the combination of relief, excitement, and curiosity that provider organizations are leaning into with Assort. It is clear customers already view Jon, Jeff, and the team not as a vendor, but as partners who co-develop solutions alongside their practices in the most strategic functions of their business.

That’s why we’re proud to lead Assort’s $76M Series B just a few months after their Series A bringing their total funding to $102M, and joining forces with the team as they build the future of patient access and engagement — and take off to Lightspeed! If any of this compels you, whether you’re interested in joining the journey as a colleague or a customer partner, don’t hesitate to reach out.