SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 19, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ember, the AI-native solution for healthcare denial prevention, today announced a $4.3M seed funding round with investors including Nexus Venture Partners and Y Combinator participating.
Ember will use the funds to expand its go-to-market team and accelerate development of its technology platform.
Trusted by some of the largest health systems in the United States, Ember is solving one of the most urgent problems in healthcare: getting medical services approved without delay.
In real-world scenarios, Ember has been shown to reduce healthcare denials more than 57%. Healthcare providers using Ember spend 83% less time on admin while reducing their audit risk and increasing their net collection rate by 25%.
Why it matters
Healthcare denials are a major source of anxiety for patients and frustration for doctors, and a drag on the resources of medical practices.
In Kaiser Family Foundation’s July 2025 Health Tracking Poll, 73% of U.S. adults said delays and denials by insurers were a “major problem,” while in a recent American Medical Association survey of 1,000 physicians, 89% cited prior authorization as a contributor to burnout.
According to an academic analysis of more than 5,000 billing codes, only 3% were shared between all payers, and over 50% were restricted to a single insurer. That means healthcare providers need to manage significantly different requirements for each insurer in the United States—private and public.
How Ember helps
Most healthcare denials are triggered by technicalities: the proper codes to describe a given procedure, the location where the procedure can be performed, the pharmaceuticals the provider can use, or the documentation they need to supply. Requirements differ from insurer to insurer and region to region—sometimes week to week. Sometimes the requirements are public. Sometimes not. Even experienced administrators can’t keep up.
But Ember can. Ember documents patients’ visits, reviews their charts, and uses its deep knowledge of payer policies to get insurance claims accepted the first time—and appeal them when they aren’t. In large-scale benchmarks audited by independent medical professionals, Ember consistently delivers better accuracy than certified human coders and general-purpose AI.
Prevents denials before they happen
As soon as a provider signs off on treatment, Ember gets to work. It assigns medical codes, pulls together documentation from patient records, and ensures the claim complies with the payer’s requirements.
Ember has the latest policies from every national payer at its digital fingertips, along with unwritten rules not found in any database. Ember analyzes trends in payer behavior from across the country to identify practices that haven’t been formally announced—but can mean the difference between approval and denial.
Drafts appeals for denied claims
Appealing denials is one of the most labor-intensive tasks for any healthcare back office. This is where Ember’s unique AI Appeals Engine comes into play. Ember’s AI agents scour the declined request and the patient’s record, including provider notes, labs, medications, orders, vitals, and more. Ember identifies the best clinical evidence to support the claim and drafts a comprehensive appeal in minutes.
Short time to value
Unlike traditional denial prevention solutions, Ember is built for rapid deployment. With its modular design and expertise on national and regional billing policies, Ember can be up and running in days with a solution customized to the provider’s needs. There’s no lengthy integration process. No need for a huge team of consultants. Providers start seeing value right away—and even more over time as the AI learns and adjusts.
Investor quote
“Ember’s founders realized two big things about healthcare denials. First, the only solution is better technology. Second, AI won’t get the job done on its own,” said Abhishek Sharma, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners. “Ember brings a unique mix of assets to the table: a comprehensive understanding of the billing landscape, real-time insights from the field, and the ability to turn knowledge into action with the latest advances in machine learning, business logic, and AI. It’s an enterprise-class solution with the disruptive impact of a startup.”
CEO quote
“In my conversations with healthcare CFOs, one theme comes through loud and clear: we need to take the burden of medical billing off clinicians and patients. They should be thinking about conditions and treatments, not procedure codes and prior auth. Every minute physicians spend on denied payments is a blow to patient care—and their practice’s margins,” said Ember CEO and cofounder Charlene Wang, former product lead at Google Health for products such as Nest and Fitbit. “At Ember, we’ve rethought the problem from first principles. We identified where AI could add value, and where we could inject insights that aren’t available in competing solutions. The proof is in the results. In a short time, we’ve been able to cut denials by more than 50% while increasing net collection rates 25%. As we continue to develop Ember, we fully expect to see those gains accelerate.”
To learn more about Ember and request a demo, visit embercopilot.ai.
About Ember
Ember is the AI-native solution for preventing healthcare denials and ensuring revenue integrity. Large hospital and specialty healthcare systems use Ember to secure prior authorization, assemble documentation, and successfully appeal denials. Ember’s deep understanding of payer policies and practices dramatically boosts approval rates, while the Ember platform integrates seamlessly with all major EHR, PMS, and payer systems, including Epic, Oracle Cerner, athenahealth, and eClinicalWorks. Headquartered in San Francisco, Ember is backed by leading investors including Nexus Venture Partners and Y Combinator.
Media Contact
Chris Ulbrich
Firebrand Marketing for Ember
415-848-9175
ember@firebrand.marketing
