SpendRule Secures $2M to Help Hospitals Track Spending

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Published by Stephen Oluwadara at February 20, 2026

How Healthcare is Bleeding From Overpayments

Founded in 2025 by Chris Heckler and Joseph Akintolayo, SpendRule is an AI-powered platform that enables healthcare systems to track their spending and prevent overpayments on purchased services. The company enters a health system environment where cost transparency and margin stability are increasingly urgent priorities.

Hospitals operate with thin margins and complex supplier networks, making financial visibility a persistent challenge. Healthcare systems manage vast inventories, encompassing medical devices, surgical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and administrative materials.

The procurement workflows are often fragmented, leading to overspending, redundant purchasing, and inventory waste. This complexity highlights the need for streamlined processes and better visibility. This can help healthcare institutions optimize resources, reduce waste, and improve their financial stability.

“Most purchased services contracts sit in a filing cabinet – literal or digital – disconnected from the payments they’re supposed to govern,” said Joseph Akintolayo, CTO and co-founder of SpendRule, told Pressnewswire.

“We change that by turning those agreements into code – encoding the actual terms, conditions, and obligations into real-time payment controls. This enables true 4-way matching – Purchase Order, Receipt, Invoice, and Contract Terms – automatically validating invoices against their contract before payment. Discrepancies are flagged with evidence and resolved upstream, without disrupting existing ERP or AP systems.”

How SpendRule is Cutting Down Healthcare Payment Inefficiencies

SpendRule is a technology that ensures hospitals pay only what was negotiated in their contracts. It is integrated with and operates on top of a hospital system’s current enterprise resource planning software, contract management software, and accounts payable workflows.

The platform pulls information from contracts, invoices, internal databases, and vendor data to validate invoices before payment is released. It flags discrepancies and tells teams when to pay and when not to. Typically, hospitals hire an auditor every two years to perform this function or manually review each invoice.

According to Heckler, SpendRule’s current competition is existing invoice auditors, such as SpendMend and GHX. However, Akintolayo said one main difference is the startup’s focus on purchase services, the type of items hospitals buy that do not have barcodes.

“Our goal is to build a more resilient hospital system,” Akintolayo said. “That’s our vision. To protect the bottom line of everyone by connecting their data and helping them make better decisions.”

SpendRule enters the market with significant momentum and is trusted by leading health systems, including OSF HealthCare, Kettering Health, MemorialCare, and MUSC Health.

These organizations are using the platform to shift from reactive auditing to proactive prevention. This enables them to enforce purchased services contract obligations before payment, improve visibility into services spend, and resolve issues faster.

“We manage thousands of purchased services contracts, many of them hundreds of pages long,” said Dave Fergus, Chief Supply Chain Officer, OSF HealthCare. “Before SpendRule, there was no realistic way to ensure every invoice line matched the contract before payment. Now, that validation happens automatically, giving us confidence in invoice accuracy, stopping the leakage, and freeing our teams from thousands of hours of manual approvals each year.”

SpendRule will use the new capital to hire and continue developing the company’s AI infrastructure.

Main Image: Joseph Akintolayo and Chris Heckler, SpendRule’s Co-founders. Image Credit: SpendRule