Avelis Health Secures $500k From Y Combinator to Reduce Patients’ Medical Bills

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Published by Stephen Oluwadara at June 26, 2025

About Avelis Health

Avelis Health was founded in February 2025 by Angel Onuoha (Chief Executive Officer) and Ahmad Shehu (Chief Technology Officer). The platform uses AI agents to identify errors, audit, and negotiate medical bills, resulting in direct savings and preventing rising premiums and less favorable coverage.

The AI-powered startup is a result of the lived experience of the CEO, Onuoha, after he struggled to pay a hefty medical bill for half a decade. “I’ve dealt with a chronic knee injury for the past decade and had multiple surgeries on my right knee. What inspired me to start Avelis was having to fight down over $250K of inflated hospital bills as a result of these procedures,” he mentioned in an email to AFROTECH.

“If I was struggling with this system, I knew millions of other Americans were facing the same problem without the resources to fight back. The medical billing system is broken, 100 million Americans have medical debt, and 50-80% of bills have errors in them.”

How The Platform Works

Employers waste hundreds of millions of dollars each year paying for erroneous medical claims. Oftentimes, this cost is always passed down to employees in the form of higher premiums and worse coverage.

The San Francisco-based platform deploys AI agents to review medical bills for errors and negotiate fair prices with providers. Using the database of hospital rates, the app ensures the prices on your bill are not above market rates. Avelis Health then creates appeal documents and contacts your hospital or insurer by phone, email, and fax.

“Imagine that every time you went to the hospital, you could send a picture of your bill to an app, and it would automatically negotiate the price down for you. This was the original idea of insurance, but somewhere along the way, they started prioritizing profit over actually helping people,” Onuoha says in a LinkedIn post speaking about the recent fund.

According to AFROTECH, Avelis Health has helped patients save hundreds of thousands of dollars within just a few months. In one notable case, a patient on the brink of bankruptcy reportedly reduced his medical debt by $250,000 through the platform. This direct reflection underscores the company’s broader mission to eliminate the $220 billion in medical debt that exists across the United States.

Avelis Health Next Steps

Announcing on LinkedIn, Avelis Health just secured a $500,000 pre-seed investment from Y Combinator. The new funding will support the debut of Payment Integrity, a solution tailored to self-insured employers.

“With the Y Combinator funding, we launched Payment Integrity for self-insured employers. We audit 100% of claims in real time, catch billing errors before they pay, and save companies 8-10% on their annual health plan spend with zero impact to employee benefits,” Onuoha shared with AFROTECH.

“We also provide detailed analytics so employers can track where every health dollar goes. This lets us protect thousands of employees through a single partnership alongside helping patients one at a time.”

The ultimate goal, he added, is to make medical care more affordable for people, “Success for us means that every time a patient goes through the healthcare system, their bill is being audited by Avelis to ensure there is no price gouging, errors, or unnecessary charges.”