Z47 leads $12.5M investment in Coral alongside Lightspeed to automate healthcare’s back office

April 20, 2026 | New York, NY  

We’re  announcing our investment in Coral with a $12.5 million round alongside Lightspeed. Coral automates healthcare’s back office: the trillion-dollar administrative layer that still runs on fax machines, manual coordination, and systems no one has seriously tried to fix.

At Z47, our conviction is that the best AI companies will be built in categories that are workflow-heavy, technology-underserved, and demand deep vertical expertise to crack. US healthcare administration is exactly that kind of category, and Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty are exactly the founders to go after it.

Healthcare’s administrative burden is not a side effect of complexity, it’s the bottleneck itself. Referrals sit in fax queues. Prior authorisations go unresolved for days. Discharges stall on unsigned paperwork. The people carrying this load: intake coordinators, billers, prior-auth specialists, don't need their systems ripped out and replaced. They need automation brought to where they already work.

That’s where Ajay and Aniket started. They’re both AI researchers from IIIT Hyderabad, who  previously were founding engineers building enterprise automation tools together at LimeChat. Ajay’s motivation to build Coral was personal: a minor accident that put him through the US system as a patient for the first time. The clinical care was fine. The admin layer around it: unanswered follow-ups, paperwork that outlasted the injury, was broken in ways that clearly weren’t going to fix themselves.

Coral's approach: connect to the systems providers already use: EHRs, fax lines, payer portals, and automate administrative workflows end-to-end. Intake, prior authorization, fax processing, patient communications, all without requiring providers to change how they work. The platform began in durable medical equipment (DME), one of the most fax-intensive corners of outpatient care, and expanded into infusion centers and specialty pharmacy. Coral has since shipped AI-powered voice and text workflows for payer and patient follow-ups, and is now building an AI workflow builder that lets providers design their own automations without an IT ticket, alongside a co-pilot layer that turns processed data into operational intelligence: denial rates, authorization bottlenecks, referral conversion patterns.

The numbers back it up: 

• Coral’s models hit 99.7% accuracy across handwritten faxes, scanned insurance cards, prior-auth templates, and payer portal screens. 
• Complex intakes complete in under five minutes.
• Revenue has reached multiple millions in under a year, with 4x growth targeted by end of 2026.
• Customers are expanding across modules, and a portion are paying full contract value upfront - unusual in enterprise software, striking in a sector with notoriously long evaluation cycles. 

Ajay Shrihari, Co-founder & CEO, Coral, said: “Every person in the healthcare system is being slowed down by the same thing: administrative work that was never built to scale. The coordinator chasing faxes. The patient waiting on a referral. The clinician buried in prior authorizations. When you automate the right things, all of them win at once. That is what Coral is building, and we are just getting started.”

Ashwin KP, Investor, Z47, commented: “US healthcare admin carries over a trillion dollars in overhead each year, yet the back-office teams doing this work have been chronically underserved by technology. Our thesis is that the most compelling AI opportunities lie in workflow-heavy, tech-underserved categories that demand deep vertical expertise to crack. Ajay and Aniket are exceptionally customer-obsessed founders who embedded themselves with these teams, understood their pain at a granular level, and built a product their customers can’t live without. The rapid growth and the caliber of customers they’ve won in a short time only reinforced our conviction. We’re privileged to partner with them.”

Rohil Bagga, Investor, Lightspeed India, added: “Healthcare is one of the hardest environments to automate, given legacy systems and fragmented workflows, yet Coral is delivering real outcomes at scale. Their product is already being used by some of the largest customers in the U.S. to dramatically reduce patient intake times and first-pass denials. At Lightspeed, we’ve had the privilege of being part of Coral’s journey since day one, and we’re excited to continue supporting the team as they transform the healthcare industry”

On the Z47 Moments podcast, we explore why the admin layer represents one of the most compelling AI opportunities in US healthcare.

The round goes toward hiring engineers alongside people who’ve spent careers inside healthcare operations: builders and domain experts in the same room.

Healthcare administration is one of those problems everyone acknowledges and no one has solved at scale, until now. Coral is building the infrastructure layer that lets providers stop losing time to paperwork and start putting it back into patient care. We’re proud to back Ajay, Aniket, and the Coral team as they scale across specialties, geographies, and the full administrative stack. The fax queue is getting shorter. That’s only the beginning.

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About Coral

Coral is a healthcare automation platform built for specialty providers. By combining intelligent document processing, agentic workflows, and voice automation, Coral integrates with existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals to automate administrative workflows from patient intake and prior authorization to billing, compliance, and patient outreach. Coral reduces human error, accelerates care delivery, and frees up healthcare staff to focus on the work that requires judgment and empathy.

About Z47

Founded in 2006, Z47 is an investment Firm with more than 150 investments to date and an AUM of over $3.5 billion. Guided by a ‘founders first’ philosophy, Z47 is committed to backing missionary founders leading India to its goal of becoming a developed nation by 2047, prioritizing founders over markets.

Z47’s focus sectors include Financial Services, Consumer, B2B, Advanced Manufacturing and Enterprise AI amongst others. We are proud partners to several Enterprise AI companies; select ones include AtomicWork, Krutrim, MoEngage, Rocketlane, and Toddle. Other select investments include Dailyhunt, Five Star Business Finance, OfBusiness, Ola, Ola Electric, and Razorpay.Z47 has offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Gurgaon and GIFT City. For more information, visit www.z47.com

For more information, please contact: newsroom@z47.com