Umar Afridi, a pharmacist by training who spent a decade in retail pharmacy, co-founded pharmacy fulfillment startup Truepill in 2016 with the aim of using technology to upend the pharmacy industry.
Truepill helped to usher in the direct-to-consumer healthcare ecosystem, building products for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, including Optum Store, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs and Eli Lilly's Lilly Direct.
Afridi stepped down from Truepill in 2022 but saw more work that needed to be done in pharmacy operations. He launched Foundation Health in 2023 to provide an artificial intelligence-powered infrastructure spanning pharmacy operations, care coordination and direct-to-patient delivery.
"Foundation Health is an evolution of that model of Truepill where we're combining world-class, high-quality patient experiences with operational excellence in the pharmacies themselves," Afridi, Foundation Health's CEO, told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview.
Foundation Health secured $20 million in a series A funding round led by Define Ventures, with participation from Vanderbilt University, Intermountain Ventures and existing investors. The company has raised $26 million since its founding, including a $6 million seed round in March 2024.
The startup will use the fresh funding to scale its sales and operations teams and accelerate development of its pharmacy solution suite.
Foundation Health was designed as a modern infrastructure layer that helps care organizations, from large health systems to direct-to-consumer brands, deliver high-quality care with less friction, Afridi said.
The idea for Foundation Health came from conversations with founders, health plans and pharma manufacturers, identifying a gap in the market for a platform that could facilitate direct-to-consumer experiences affordably, quickly and at scale.
"When you look at health systems' specialty pharmacy, a lot of the work they do is using kind of decades-old software, it's manual processes and it's connecting things together using spreadsheets. Recently, they've seen a massive increase in demand for services, but also the operational overhead, which means more employees. The only way to interact with them is through phone calls. We can automate that," Afridi said.
The company developed an in-house AI pharmacist assistant, called PAIGE AI, that automates patient communication and prior authorization workflows across medical and pharmacy benefits. Integrated across major electronic health records, including Epic, the AI pharmacy assistant handles refill processing, adherence outreach, benefits verification, medication onboarding and prior authorization submissions, and is HIPAA and SOC 2 compliant, according to the company.
By automating high-volume, repetitive tasks, the AI tool can reduce care team workload by up to 75%, while also improving patient adherence and freeing pharmacists to focus on complex clinical care, Afridi said.
Foundation Health also built a digital pharmacy platform to provide patients a front-end pharmacy experience, from creating accounts to managing refills and copays to mail order and home delivery.
"We'll give patients a self-serve experience, a completely white-label digital experience, all connected to this operational automation," he noted.
Foundation Health also offers a pharmacy dashboard that unifies fragmented workflows, including benefit verification, prescriptions, orders, prior authorization workflows and delivery logistics, And the startup built a direct-to-patient solution for pharmaceutical manufacturers and consumer health brands.
Foundation Health is working with major health systems like Intermountain Health and Hackensack Meridian Health. "In our pipeline, we have about 50 health systems that we're talking to in various stages," Afridi said.
"We are thrilled to partner with Foundation Health and their amazing technology,” said Eboney Hadnott, network director, ambulatory care pharmacy services at Hackensack Meridian Health, in a statement. “This collaboration will help us streamline our administrative tasks, allowing us to focus more on what truly matters—our patients."
Afridi also sees opportunities to work with pharma manufacturers. "We want to eventually connect the dots where it's health systems, pharma manufacturers, and then bring in the payers as well," he said.
Unlike Afridi's previous company Truepill, Foundation Health doesn't operate pharmacies. Truepill was acquired by at-home diagnostics company LetsGetChecked in a $525 million deal last year, Axios reported.
"That was one of the learnings from building Truepill; essentially it's very hard to build world-class operations and world-class technology. You're always going to be kind of splitting time between the two, because operations requires constant improvement in cost-to-fill and running streamlined operations. But then you're also dealing with fairly large workforces as well. This time out, we're just focused on the software," Afridi said. "It's taking a lot of the learnings from powering direct-to-consumer for the past decade for other companies, and now bringing that experience to pharma manufacturers, as well as health systems, where we know how to build, launch and operate these services, but we also know how to make them successful. I think that's missing from all the new entrants into the space."
Unlike point solutions that address single workflows, Foundation Health's platform delivers an end-to-end solution that streamlines pharmacy and care operations, according to the company.
Foundation Health's approach is "comprehensive, scalable, and AI-native, and solves real pain points for pharmacists and patients," noted Lynne Chou O’Keefe, founder and managing partner at Define Ventures.