Ferry Health, an agentic AI platform supporting patients in administrative tasks, has launched out of stealth.
The startup, founded in 2024, has raised $9 million in seed funding from a16z, Index Ventures and others.
Ferry leverages AI agents to make calls on behalf of users to find and schedule in-network care in all 50 states. It partners with health systems, payers and care navigation platforms, with over a million patients having access to Ferry today. Executives are expecting that to grow 5x by the end of 2026.
Ferry agents make calls or look online to find and book needed appointments. They take into account insurance, subspecialty, whether a provider is taking new patients and appointment availability. Escalation to humans is available as needed. For early access customers, Ferry also coordinates for imaging and home health visits in the same way as primary and specialty appointments. It plans to roll out broader access to those features soon.
The company was started by two brothers, plus their longtime friend Andrew Buie, after they had a hard time helping their father navigate specialty appointments following hospitalization. Mehul Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Ferry, recalled their “canonical experience of American healthcare” where in the inpatient setting, the support is high-touch and everything is taken care of. “And then … moving to an outpatient setting and back home, and we didn’t know what was happening,” Mehta told Fierce Healthcare in an advanced interview.
Mehta and his brother and co-founder, Keyur, manually made a spreadsheet of potential doctors by specialty in the area, calling them individually. “We did all that work and we ended up getting to the right answer and a great set of providers,” Mehul Mehta recalled. As people were talking more about large language models in 2023, the Mehta brothers felt inspired to build a patient-facing assistant. “It should feel literally like you have the best executive assistant in the world working on your behalf to do what we just did for dad,” Mehul Mehta said.
(Ferry Health)
While marketplaces to book appointments like Zocdoc exist, they still require a level of savvy and work to navigate, Mehul Mehta argues. Patients need to specify what subspecialty they need, manually parse available appointment times and confirm the booking themselves. Ferry takes on all those steps on behalf of a patient. Depending on a partner’s preference, Ferry can either surface available options to a user immediately or do a deeper dive that more comprehensively evaluates providers based on specific preferences, surfacing the best options to a member within a few hours.
“We want this to be something that works for every patient across the country, not just the folks that have this type of support already,” Mehul Mehta said.
One investor—a practicing physician—sees real value in the product. “In some cities, some set of doctors are on platforms like Zocdoc. For most Americans, it is a phone call. And not only that it is often a phone call with very incomplete information,” Vineeta Agarwala, M.D., Ph.D., general partner at a16z, an early Ferry investor, told Fierce Healthcare. (Mehul Mehta previously worked at a16z.)
Agarwala, who works at Stanford, says it’s a struggle referring even her own patients to a different department within the organization, despite clear benefits to keeping a patient within a single organization for continuity of care. Bottlenecks create a cumbersome experience for patients, and increase inbound patient call volume at doctor’s offices.
“This sounds like a simple problem, but it’s actually a growing problem,” she said.
Ferry is able to address this exact challenge by integrating with one health system partner’s internal scheduling software. This streamlines scheduling without the need to even make calls.
“As we go, the more that we can integrate these things to be direct connectivity, real-time resolution, as opposed to phone-based, everybody wins in that situation,” Mehul Mehta said.
Ferry can embed inside a health plan’s provider search experience. Insurance care managers can also use Ferry as a copilot. Additionally, Ferry works with third-party administrators (TPAs), benefits platforms and preventive care groups. For its database, Ferry leverages the National Provider Identifier (NPI) Registry and third-party provider data. These data are enhanced with browser-based agents. Ferry continuously updates its database with insight from every call it makes.
“There’s all this unstructured data that we’re learning and updating at the node level,” Mehul Mehta said. “It just allows us to be really targeted.”
Today, Ferry’s core capabilities are to find, schedule and remind about appointments. Long-term, Mehul Mehta sees possible use cases like supporting health plans with coordinating transportation or giving members visibility into prior authorizations.
Ferry typically assesses for a number of outcomes, including appointment scheduling rate, appointment attendance rate, provider approval rating by a member and the member experience ratings for Ferry interactions. It also measures the time to book and time to next available appointment through Ferry compared to a provider’s baseline, as well as call time saved per appointment.
“No patient likes the phone,” Agarwala said. “It is entirely a failure of the system that we don’t provide easier methods.”