Prescribing medications to patients is only one step to improve their health, as making sure that patients start therapies and stay on them is a critical part of the process.
From prescription to long-term adherence, there continue to be major gaps in the patient experience. Many life sciences companies find that efforts to engage and support patients once they are prescribed their medicines still fall short due to siloed data, disparate systems and poor coordination.
Courier Health launched in 2022 with an artificial intelligence-powered platform purpose-built for biopharma that manages the end-to-end patient journey from education to patient enrollment, benefits and prior authorization, through therapy initiation and adherence. Courier Health's AI agents can automate tasks such as, intake, benefits checks and information requests, according to the company.
Courier Health raised $50 million in series B funding led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from existing investors including Norwest Venture Partners and Work-Bench. Norwest Venture Partners and Work-Bench also backed the company's $16.5 million series A funding round in July 2024 as Courier Health built out its customer relationship management (CRM) platform for life sciences companies.
The startup aims to "rewrite the patient experience in healthcare," starting with simplifying and coordinating complex patient journeys for those who depend on innovative medicines, Danny Sigurdson, founder and CEO of Courier Health, said.
"As focus has been to help engage and support patients on their journey when they have a chronic condition or rare disease, and the medicine is a really important part of that journey," he told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
The fresh funding will fuel Courier Health's investment in product innovation, including scaling its agentic AI capabilities, and building out its team as it hires across product, engineering, client solutions and sales, according to executives.
Nearly 60% of biopharma companies consider their data fragmented or inactionable, and less than 10% have sufficient data maturity to leverage AI in a meaningful way, according to a recent report.
Courier Health built technology to solve these pain points by connecting data and systems related to the patient experience, applying intelligence to surface insights and proactively identify at-risk patients, executives said.
Despite the billions spent in drug R&D and getting a medication to market, there continue to be challenges with getting approved medications into patients' hands, with many biopharma companies seeing low activation and retention rates.
More than half of prescriptions for newly launched specialty drugs never reach patients, according to IQVIA data. IQVIA’s 2024 pharmacy claims analysis followed prescriptions for novel active substances launched in 2022-2023. For all claims, 52% were rejected by the original payor, 13% eventually approved by a different payor, and 39% rejected by all payors. That means 61% of original claims were ultimately approved and filled—but 17% were later abandoned, leaving only 44% that actually reached patients.
"There is a lot of money that goes into driving awareness to physicians, to patients, to communities, but there are pretty abysmal rates at enabling patients and their physicians, frankly, to be successful and achieve the health outcomes that we all expected," Sigurdson said. "For every 10 patients prescribed specialty therapy, three don't even start, and another three or four discontinue in the first few months."
"When we talk about helping deliver a better patient experience, it's about taking all of that complexity out of that final mile of the process. It's about bringing together the data that is out there and exists that's coming from the providers, the payers, the prior authorization systems, the pharmacies, financial assistance, foundations, communities, sometimes educators, all the various offerings and bringing that together in one place to orchestrate a more seamless patient experience that is better for the patients, better for providers, and people are actually able to access and have a chance of being successful in their innovative medicines," Sigurdson said.
Courier Health designed a platform with deep data integrations, intelligent workflows driven by context-rich AI, intuitive user interfaces designed specifically for market access and patient services teams, and AI agents that can execute key tasks for reliable automation and scale. The aim is to give biopharma teams better visibility, control and data intelligence to ensure high-quality interactions with providers, pharmacies, as well as patients and their families, executives said.
"From an agentic perspective, we really think about what are the opportunities to support the human users, patient services teams and field reimbursement teams. There are also opportunities where there are pretty clear outcomes that we can execute against to help supplement those human users and actually do the work agentically. On processing patient intakes, for example, AI agents can be powerful because you can explain that clearly defined outcome. You can put boundaries around what we're asking the AI agent to do. We do a lot of work to ensure it's secure and compliant, but it allows it to work autonomously and very intelligently in a way that gives the human users time back to focus on the higher-level tasks that would require empathy and creative thinking and human-to-human interactions," Sigurdson said.
Courier Health plans to continue investing in AI capabilities to integrate and connect data, orchestrate workflows and execute patient engagement activities, "whether that's AI supplementing our human users or agentic AI fully executing certain tasks that have clear outcomes," he noted.
In 2025, Courier Health increased the number of customers and therapies supported on its platform by over 400% and more than doubled its headcount to meet market demand. The company claims that its clients see a 15% to 20% increase in patient starts and a 10% to 12% increase in six-month persistency.
“Healthcare, especially life sciences, has long lacked a dedicated, purpose-built platform to manage patients,” said Billy Deitch, partner at Oak HC/FT, in a statement. “True patient-centricity is often promised but rarely delivered, and Courier Health changes that narrative. They provide essential infrastructure and an incredibly thoughtful AI strategy that biopharma is excited to adopt at a rapid pace. Oak is proud to partner with Danny and his team as they redefine the standard for the patient experience.”