At Lightspeed, we have made a number of investments reducing administrative burden for providers. Naturally, we were curious to explore the other side of the provider-payor coin.
Over the past two years, our healthcare team spent considerable time studying the payor payment stack. What we found is a system defined by inefficient middlemen, fragmented data silos, and services-heavy workflows that bloat the total cost of care for everyone involved. Clearinghouses move claims from provider to payor. Primary code editors run first-pass edits. Multiple layers of secondary vendors then review, flag, and re-review those claims, often adjudicating on imperfect and stale information. The back-and-forth between providers and payors on a single claim can take upward of 200 days.
After two years of speaking with dozens of payors and providers, technical architects, AI researchers, and incumbent vendors, a few things became clear.
- The AI bot wars between siloed provider vs. payer sides will only perpetuate the costly adversarial relationship.
- The atomic unit of how clinical data translates to financial action is obsolete — the claim is an artificial compression of high-signal data, a trade-off we may no longer have to make in a compute-rich power world.
- Business alignment is as critical as the technology itself. It will take a special founder to direct the massive payor and health system barges to a new paradigm.
We found that alignment in vision with Raj Ronanki and Signal Labs, and are thrilled to lead the Seed round.
Raj Ronanki
Raj is, in our assessment, one of a handful of people in the world with the right combination of vision, relationships, and operational depth to build such a next-generation enterprise technology platform. As CEO of Lyric, a TPG-backed payment integrity company serving over 100 health plan customers, he has operated at the center of this problem for years. Before that, as President of Carelon Digital Platforms at Elevance Health (formerly Anthem), he led AI and digital strategy for the second-largest private payor in the United States, overseeing platforms serving more than 45 million members.
Our team got to know Raj over nearly two years through regular discussions on payment integrity, payor technology, and as a member of Lightspeed’s Healthtech Advisory Council. Week after week, we were struck by his combination of ground-level operational fluency and frontier-level strategic thinking. It’s a rare blend that gives us high conviction he can navigate the complexity of this market.
What Signal Labs Is Building
Raj and his team are building what they call “attention infrastructure” — a coordination layer that helps large institutions determine which signals deserve action, who should act, and when. The healthcare payment stack is a powerful first instantiation of this idea because the signals (claims, authorizations, clinical data) are high-volume, high-value, and fundamentally miscoordinated today. Signal Labs is building an AI-first coordination infrastructure capable of forming trust zones between key stakeholders, like payers and health systems. We believe the foundation models capable of processing clinical documentation, understanding payer-specific rules, and making context-aware decisions at scale simply did not exist a few years ago. Signal Labs is building on this moment. Over time, the architectural principles underlying Signal Labs’ attention infrastructure have the potential to extend into other complex, multi-party industries like cybersecurity, freight and logistics, energy and utilities, financial services, and critical infrastructure.
The Path Ahead
The long-term vision is ambitious: Raj describes Signal Labs as a self-governing, intelligent, real-time infrastructure layer for critical industries. One designed to reduce friction, create transparency, and restore trust between America’s most critical institutions.
We are thrilled to partner with Raj and the entire Signal Labs team and lead their Series Seed financing. The opportunity to reduce waste, improve collaboration, and ultimately deliver better outcomes for patients, and in time, other key industries, is exactly the kind of problem we love to work on at Lightspeed.
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