Today, one in five Americans receive behavioral health services. As that number has grown over the last decade, reimbursement for these services has expanded accordingly. But amid this growth, the industry’s core infrastructure has lagged behind. The software that powers scheduling, documentation, billing, and care coordination remains stuck in the past. The result is a paradox: a sector flooded with patient demand, but starved of the necessary underlying tools to meet this demand effectively. We believe that the company that solves this will build one of the most important platforms in all of healthcare.
Behavioral health sits at the center of healthcare’s cost and access challenges: demand continues to rise, reimbursement is a tangled web, and the software supporting clinicians was built for an earlier era of healthcare. To compensate, providers have assembled patchwork technology stacks: a legacy EHR for documentation, a separate tool for intake and eligibility, another system for revenue cycle, and a complicated web of workarounds to hold the fragile pieces together. Even within their narrow scope, current tools fall short; they function in isolation, compounding errors rather than enabling a unified workflow. This fragmentation drives higher software spend and serious operational overhead—from delayed access to care to lost revenue opportunities and clinician burnout.
Historically, incentives in behavioral health software have been misaligned. Companies optimized for short-term cash flow rather than long-term product quality, and practices became increasingly burdened by their vendors’ ever-growing technical debt. EHRs were largely single-function systems that didn’t capture enough wallet share to support venture-scale outcomes. The result was a prolonged period of underinvestment, with limited innovation and venture capital largely on the sidelines.
That era is over. We could not be more thrilled to lead Ease’s $41M Series A to redefine healthcare’s operating system, unifying intake (CRM), clinical (EHR), and billing (RCM) into a single, AI-native core platform.
Ease unifies admissions, care, and billing into a single platform designed to eliminate administrative burden and become the provider’s core system. EHRs have long sat at the center of care delivery, but they were designed to digitize paper records, not to run modern organizations. (Just ask any provider about their EHR’s NPS!) Ease transforms the EHR from a compliance obligation into a growth engine—improving clinician efficiency, and consolidating software spend onto a single platform. Built on a unified data model, Ease’s AI supports the entire practice team, from administrators and billers to providers and executive leadership teams. Since launching, the Ease team has rapidly built a vertically integrated AI stack for their customers, spanning ambient documentation, automated charting and chart auditing, a CRM and agentic call center, and an autonomous prior authorization engine, among other hugely important elements of physician workflows. Their strategy is to create a unified intelligence layer: once data enters the system, Ease’s AI orchestrates workflows end-to-end, propagating context across clinical records, forms, and operational processes to drive efficiency, accuracy, and leverage at scale.
We’ve seen this playbook succeed in other industries. Companies like Toast, Rippling, Stripe, and ServiceTitan each built category-defining businesses by consolidating fragmented workflows into a single unified operating system, leveraging technology, data, and distribution to displace point solutions. Behavioral health is ripe for the next transformation, and Ease’s team is perfectly positioned to scale its core technology engine across other ambulatory markets that are long overdue for reinvention.
Ease is already live and scaling with customers, and we’ve been deeply impressed by the product, team and speed of execution. The founding team brings deep experience across healthcare, technology, and company building. CEO Zach Cohen is a former investing partner at a16z. CTO Raymond Wang is an engineering leader with a track record of building and scaling elite technical teams. President Steve Gold previously built and sold the behavioral health leader Refresh to Optum. Together, they bring an unusual combination of operator depth and domain expertise to one of healthcare’s most structurally important challenges.
We can’t wait to support Zach, Raymond, and Steve as they build the infrastructure for the next generation of care.
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Daisy Wolf is an investing partner on the Bio + Health team, focused on consumer health, the intersection of healthcare and fintech, and healthcare software.
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Anish Acharya Anish Acharya is an entrepreneur and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. At a16z, he focuses on consumer investing, including AI-native products and companies that will help usher in a new era of abundance.
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Eva Steinman is an investing partner on the Bio + Health team.
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