San Francisco-based Neon Health just raised $6 million for AI tools that smooth out the many steps before a specialty medication can be issued,
Endpoints News
learned exclusively.
NFX led the seed round, and DigiTx, Olive Capital, Ascend, Village Global and Digital Health Venture Partners also invested in the round.
Patients often face insurance, financial, and logistical barriers that delay or block access to specialty drugs, which are expensive and often require injections or other difficult methods. As a result, some never finish their treatment programs.
Neon aims to speed up the process by using AI to make phone calls, navigate websites, monitor patients and schedule appointments. The goal is to help pharmaceutical companies cut costs by reducing the number of human staff necessary, like call center agents, case managers and other types of patient support staff. It also hopes to help pharma companies avoid losing insurer payouts and revenue when patients stop their treatment early.
“These hurdles are so hard for patients to get over, especially when they’re battling these chronic and acute conditions; they have a crazy drop-off rate,” co-founder and CEO Stedman Hood told Endpoints. “Pharma looks at this, and they say, ‘Let’s help them to help us.’ We spent $3.4 billion on average bringing this drug to market, and now we’ve got a crazy drop-off in our funnel when patients actually need this stuff.”
A new class of startups that uses AI to cut down on administrative work in healthcare has grown in recent years. The number of deals for AI to do that has shot past investment into research or clinical uses, according to a
Silicon Valley Bank 2025 midyear report.
Stedman said he chose specialty medicine because the workflows are messy, the impact is big and the market is large. In 2021, specialty drugs accounted for around 6% of prescriptions in Medicare Part D, but they made up 71% of overall drug spending, according to a
study.
Stedman is also betting on Neon’s ability to customize workflows, building AI tools that are tailored to its clients’ systems, which he said can be hard for companies to build themselves internally from scratch.
Neon is currently working with around six pharmaceutical brands. While it’s solely focused on pharma for now, Stedman said the company may expand its AI to health systems, such as helping prevent ER readmissions through follow-up calls.
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