Patient Advocate Full Time at Understood Care (Remote)

Role details

Work type

Remote

Job description

This is a test. Will be modified shortly.

Culture: Early-stage YC startup with a small, mission-driven team (currently 7–9 people). Emphasis on using AI and healthcare expertise to solve a massive, costly problem in U.S. healthcare.
Remote-first: All current job openings (Billing & Collections Specialist, Contracting/Credentialing & Billing Specialist, Telehealth Physician, Telehealth Psychiatrist) are listed as fully remote. greenhouse.io
Engineering & product culture: The company was founded by operators with backgrounds at high-growth healthtech startups (Cedar, Finni, SiteRx) and 2x tech founders (Kevin Bailey); there is a strong focus on building proprietary AI and data infrastructure.
Notable perks: Not explicitly listed, but employees get to shape a new category of AI-supported healthcare navigation, work directly with founders, and have a direct impact on patient outcomes.

One-liner: Understood Care is an AI-native virtual patient advocacy platform that matches Medicare patients with a dedicated human advocate and AI co-pilot to navigate the U.S. healthcare system, at little to no out-of-pocket cost.
Entity Type: Private (pre-seed and seed stages; Y Combinator Summer 2025 batch)
Headquarters: New York, NY, USA
Founded: 2025
Founders: Sam Wu (CEO), Kevin Bailey (CTO), Dr. Adam Bonder (Medical Director)

Primary industry: Healthcare IT / Patient advocacy / Medicare navigation
Target customers: B2C (Medicare patients) and B2B (Medicare Advantage plans, providers, payers)
Mission: To make healthcare navigation accessible for all Medicare patients, transforming patient advocacy from a boutique service into universal healthcare infrastructure.

Virtual Patient Advocacy Platform: A service where each patient is permanently matched with a dedicated human advocate (often a nurse, pharmacist, or social worker) who helps with scheduling, paperwork, insurance claims, transportation, housing, meals, medication management, and chronic care coordination. The advocate follows a 7-day communication cadence during active cases and monthly check-ins thereafter. The service is fully virtual via phone and video, HIPAA-compliant, and covered by Medicare Part B and most Medicare Advantage plans (patients typically pay $0 out-of-pocket). understoodcare.com
Ava (AI Co-pilot): An AI system that works behind the scenes to help advocates execute administrative tasks such as initiating calls, summarizing medical records, drafting correspondence, suggesting resources, and generating Medicare-compliant claims documentation. Every interaction feeds a proprietary multimodal dataset that improves the platform’s effectiveness over time. prnewswire.com

Valuation: Not disclosed (private startup)
Total Funding: $8.4M raised as of March 2026, comprising a $3.4M pre-seed round led by 1984 Ventures (with participation from Y Combinator) and a $5M seed round led by Rethink Education and Zeal Capital Partners. prnewswire.com
Key Metric: Serving thousands of active patients across all 50 U.S. states since launching patient care in March 2025; on track to support more than 10,000 new patients in 2026.
Notable Investors/Partners: Rethink Education, Zeal Capital Partners, 1984 Ventures, Y Combinator. Accepts Medicare, UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and Aetna (top 3 Medicare Advantage plans). ycombinator.com
Growth Signals:
- Expanded from first patient in April 2025 to all 50 states within 8 months.
- Active patients reach out to advocates an average of 5 times per month; advocates proactively reach out 11 times per month.
- Established relationships with three of the largest Medicare Advantage plans.
- 4 active job postings (as of July 2026), showing 33.3% monthly growth in postings. linkedin.com

Dedicated, permanent advocate: Patients are assigned one advocate who remains their contact even after case resolution – no call-center queues or rotating staff.
AI-native, not AI-first: Human advocates are supported by a proprietary AI co-pilot (Ava) that continuously learns from every interaction, improving speed and quality of advocacy.
Revenue through CMS codes: The company uses newly available Medicare billing codes for patient advocacy (2024 benefit), making the service mostly free for patients and creating a sustainable payer model.
Proprietary multimodal dataset: Growing dataset of calls, transcripts, documents, workflows, and outcomes that strengthens the AI moat over time.

Scale the Ava AI co-pilot across all advocate workflows.
Deepen partnerships with providers, payers, and community organizations.
Ramp to support 10,000+ new patients in 2026.
Continue building the infrastructure to turn patient advocacy into a universally accessible healthcare service.

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