Candid Health cofounder Doug Proctor spun his laptop around to show me a herd of wild horses grazing behind him in upstate New York during our first Zoom call. It was a fitting flex for two guys who built one of healthcare’s hottest infrastructure companies while deliberately staying out of the Bay Area bubble, dressed, as cofounder and CEO Nick Perry put it, in “glasses and black T-shirts.”
The duo just raised a $120 million Series D, Fortune learned exclusively, led by Sixth Street Growth. Existing backers Oak HC/FT, 8VC and Y Combinator also piled back in. The round triples Candid’s 2025 valuation, and comes as annual recurring revenue grew 190% year over year. It lands roughly 18 months after Candid’s $52.5 million Series Cwhich itself followed a $29 million Series B just six months earlier, bringing Candid’s total raised past $219 million.
Candid runs the billing operation for doctors so they don’t have to. Every insurer has its own rulebook for how a claim must be filled out, and most providers still rely on billing software built in the early 2000s to navigate over 1,000 different insurers’ rules. When something’s off (like a misplaced comma or wrong code), the claim gets kicked back, and either the patient or the doctor eats the cost. Candid replaces that process with AI agents and a rules engine trained on the submission quirks of more than 1,000 payers, so claims go out correctly the first time.
Perry and Proctor met at Palantir, where Perry led healthcare work and Proctor built defense and intelligence systems. Both describe revenue cycle management (RCM), the process by which healthcare providers get paid, as fundamentally the same data integration problem Palantir was built to solve, just applied to medical billing.
Perry says growth has been almost entirely organic. “We’ve grown by word of mouth,” he told me, noting Candid spent virtually nothing on marketing until now. According to him, the business has grown 6x, then 5x, then 2.5x on a run rate basis in recent years, with net revenue retention close to 200%, meaning existing customers barely churn and simply grow their spend as their own claim volume scales.
Medical billing represents roughly 1% of U.S. GDP, and per federal dataU.S. healthcare spending overall runs about 18% of GDP. The country spends $280 billion annually on healthcare billing administration nationwide, a figure independently cited across industry coverage of the space. He calls the problem “worthy and wicked”: worthy because it touches nearly every American who’s ever gotten an incorrect medical bill, and wicked because fixing it requires untangling decades of bad incentives baked into how providers get paid.
Sixth Street’s Alex Katz says his firm interviewed nearly 40 Candid customers before writing the check, and the feedback was “consistently off the charts.” Customer proof points back that up: Talkiatry cut manual billing work by 40% and now collects 98.3% of what payers owe, while Nourish grew without adding billing staff and automatically processes 96.7% of its claims.
The real threat to legacy incumbents isn’t just software, it’s economics. Proctor frames Candid’s mission as shrinking the billing industry itself, stripping out the manual, offshore labor that props up older vendors and keeping those savings for the business instead. Perry, for his part, says he’s not fixated on an eventual IPO. “Stripe is a very large private company, and they seem great,” he said.
See you tomorrow,
Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS
– Augustusa New York City-based developer of an AI- and stablecoin-native clearing bank designed to enable global financial institutions to move money across major currencies in real time, raised $180 million in Series B funding. Tiger Global led the round and was joined by Hummingbird, QED, and others.
– Humanoida London, U.K.-based developer of humanoid industrial robots, raised $152 million in Series A funding. Prime Movers Lab led the round and was joined by Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and Aglaé Ventures.
– Grita San Francisco-based developer of robotics and AI systems that automate construction and infrastructure work, raised $32.4 million in a $26 million Series A round led by Obvious Ventures and joined by Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investments, following a $6.4 million seed round.
– Bluecore Energya Long Beach, Calif.-based developer of small modular nuclear reactors for floating barge-based power plants, raised $10 million in funding. Slauson & Co. led the round and was joined by Harlem Capital, Precursor Ventures, LMNT, Visible Hands VC, Karman Ventures, and others.
– ORiSa Torino, Italy-based developer of laser-based wireless power transmission systems designed for space, raised €5 million ($5.7 million) in pre-seed funding. Earlybird and Pitchdrive led the round and were joined by Galaxia, Vento, and Piemonte Next Fund.
– Defeat the AIa Long Beach, Calif.-based developer of an AI-powered legal assistant, raised $4.2 million across pre-seed and seed rounds from individual investors.
– Photon Taila Champaign, Ill.-based developer of free-space quantum memory devices for quantum-computing and networking systems, raised $4 million in seed funding. Playground Global led the round.
– Zeoma London, U.K.-based global wealth infrastructure company, raised $2.7 million in pre-seed funding. Fabric Ventures led the round and was joined by Plug and Play and Tritemius.
PRIVATE EQUITY
– Theyan Alameda, Calif.-based developer of battery materials, raised $300 million in private equity funding. Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures led the investment and were joined by 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, T. Rowe Price Associates, and others.
– Knox Lane acquired Cross Country Healthcarea Boca Raton, Fla.-based health care workforce solutions company. Financial terms were not disclosed.
FUNDS + FUNDS OF FUNDS
– Golden Gate Capitala San Francisco-based private equity firm, raised $1.5 billion for its seventh fund focused on industrials, consumer services, and technology & financial services companies.
– TruArc Partnersa New York City-based private equity firm, raised $1.2 billion for its fifth fund focused on business services and specialty manufacturing companies.
– Avenue Growth Partnersa Washington, D.C.-based growth equity firm, raised $155 million for its second fund focused on vertical technology companies.
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