As billions of dollars in government aid go unused per year, a health tech firm that just wrapped a robust fundraising round is working to streamline benefits access.
Auxa Health, a tech company with offices in New York and DC, uses AI to help people get connected to health benefits. The team raised a $5.2 million seed announced on Monday and led by the DC-based venture capital firm Zeal Capital Partners. Existing investor AlleyCorp and new investors K50 Ventures, Laconia Capital Group and Chaac Ventures also participated.
To date, Auxa Health has raised $6.2 million. This is the company’s first external funding round.
In tandem with this win, the health tech company earned a feature on the Nasdaq tower in Times Square on Monday. Monica Chopra, the DC-based CEO and one of Auxa’s cofounders, said she’s been in touch with people at stock exchange over the years. The team there told Chopra they wanted to showcase the accomplishments of women- and minority-led businesses like Auxa. Chopra called it mission alignment.
Auxa Health featured at the Nasdaq. (Courtesy Zeal Capital Partners)
“It really is such an incredible thing to do for so many different types of organizations,” said Chopra.
Auxa Health was incubated out of AlleyCorp and incorporated in January 2022, with Chopra coming on as the founding CEO in October 2022. She has more than two decades of healthcare experience, including previous service as a vice president at the health insurance company Oscar Health.
Auxa is a “one-stop shop of benefit information,” Chopra said. The firm pulls together various healthcare sources, including state and federal benefits and community organization resources. It categorizes benefit needs like chronic disease management, as well as post-discharge and meal planning, to streamline wellness processes. The company also uses AI to summarize benefit information.
The company’s ultimate goal and mission is to make care options easy to understand for everyone involved, Chopra said. The tech is already being used by clients in a few states, although she declined to name them.
“We want to make sure it can be as accessible as possible to both the care teams that are supporting folks, but also the caregivers and the patients themselves,” she said.
Currently, Auxa Health has seven staffers. Chopra plans to use the funds raised in this seed round to scale the technology and hire more engineers. She also plans to bring on business development leaders.
Auxa Health’s platform. (Courtesy)
Nasir Qadree, the founder and managing partner at Zeal Capital Partners, said Auxa Health aligns with the VC firm’s own mission: to invest in equity-minded companies working to make healthcare and other industries more accessible and affordable.
“The crux of our investment strategy is focused on backing exceptional diverse management teams that are rethinking the building blocks of wealth, from employment pathways to financial technology, the lens towards inclusion in wellness and, now, health equity,” Qadree said.
Chopra said she and her team are now smarter because of the questions Zeal Capital Partners would ask them in the investment process.
“As an early-stage company, and as a first-time founder, partnering with investment firms that are really going to help poke and prod and ask you the right questions to ensure that you’re thinking things on a holistic level is incredibly powerful,” she said.
As part of the deal, Zeal Capital Partner Emily Zhen will be joining Auxa Health’s board. She leads the firm’s health equity investing efforts. As a former caregiver herself, Auxa Health’s strategy to make care and benefits easy to understand stood out to Zhen, she said.
Each year, billions of dollars in government aid go left unused, Zhen mentioned. Auxa Health is trying to change that by making different benefit options easy to understand.
“I was just really floored by how the mission aligned,” Zhen said. “There’s a lot of power in using our latest technologies for good.”
Zeal Capital Partners
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