Cohere Health Raises $90M Series C to Scale Prior Auth AI Platform

Cohere Health closed a $90M Series C led by Temasek, pushing total funding to $200M. The company processes over 12 million prior authorization requests annually and auto-approves up to 90% of them — and now has the capital to expand beyond prior auth into broader clinical decision-making.

The Deal

The round was led by Temasek, the Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund, with continued participation from existing investors Deerfield Management, Define Ventures, Flare Capital Partners, Longitude Capital, and Polaris Partners. The close brings Cohere's total capital raised to $200M since founding.

Cohere Health's platform — Cohere Unify™ — sits at the intersection of health plan and provider workflows, handling utilization management and prior authorization at scale. The stated use of proceeds: expand into new clinical use cases beyond prior auth, scale operations, and deepen AI product investment.

What It Means for RCM

• Prior auth automation at institutional scale is validated. Temasek doesn't lead healthcare IT rounds casually. $90M at this stage signals the investment community views AI-driven UM as a durable market, not a regulatory arbitrage play that disappears when CMS mandates e-PA.
• 90% auto-approval is the number that matters. If Cohere can genuinely auto-adjudicate 9 of 10 prior auth requests at a 93% provider satisfaction rate, that directly attacks the denial and rework cycle that costs provider organizations billions annually in administrative overhead. For billing teams, that means less time chasing auth status and fewer downstream denials from incomplete UM documentation.
• The expansion play is the real signal. Cohere framing this as "clinical decision-making" beyond prior auth suggests they're moving toward broader UM use cases — concurrent review, retrospective review, potentially care management. That puts them on a collision course with CorroHealth, Evolent, and the established managed care organizations in the long run.
• Health plan relationships are the moat. Cohere sells to plans, not providers directly. That's a different distribution model than most RCM AI vendors and means providers encounter Cohere's technology as a payer-mandated tool, not a vendor they chose.

Market Context

This round lands as prior authorization reform is simultaneously advancing legislatively (CMS's final rule requiring MA plans to implement electronic PA by 2027) and being contested by payers trying to preserve clinical discretion. Cohere's pitch to health plans is essentially: modernize UM before regulators force you to, and use AI to do it in a way that doesn't erode your clinical control.

The prior auth AI market has been one of the most active funding segments in healthcare IT over the past 18 months. Cohere, Infinx, Olive AI's prior auth assets, and a dozen smaller players are all competing for health plan and provider wallet share. The difference with Cohere is distribution — health plan relationships mean the platform gets deployed at network scale, touching every provider in the plan's network rather than requiring individual provider adoption.

At $200M total raised with 12M+ annual requests processed, Cohere is one of the better-capitalized and better-scaled pure-play prior auth AI companies in the market. The question is whether "prior auth AI" is a standalone category or a feature that gets absorbed by the large RCM platforms (Waystar, Availity, Epic) as the technology matures.

Source: PR Newswire · Published by RevCycleAI Research · May 17, 2026