What You Should Know
- The Acquisition: Collectly, a dominant AI-powered patient financial experience platform that has processed over $1 billion in payments across 3,000+ facilities, has acquired Y Combinator-backed Pledge Health.
- The Missing Piece: Collectly has historically owned the post-visit patient billing and engagement experience. Pledge Health brings powerful, upstream pre-service automation (coverage verification, upfront cost estimates, prior auth readiness).
- The Tech Upgrade: Pledge Health utilizes a visual “AI agent builder” that relies on intelligent API connections and dynamic browser automation. This is a massive upgrade over legacy Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which relies on brittle screen-scraping that breaks every time a payer updates their website.
Moving Beyond Brittle RPA
For the past decade, hospitals have tried to solve the pre-service maze using basic Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The problem is that RPA is essentially “screen-scraping”—a fragile technology that breaks the second an insurance company changes a button on its portal.
Pledge Health takes a vastly superior approach. It utilizes a visual AI agent builder that combines direct API connections with intelligent browser automation. These AI agents can reliably run complex Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): they can retrieve benefit details from clearinghouses, flag contradictory network statuses, generate highly accurate pre-service cost estimates, and orchestrate financial clearance—all without human intervention.
Automating these pre-visit steps eliminates the notorious “15-minute-per-patient” administrative bottleneck. It drives cleaner claims, increases upfront collections, and allows health systems to scale operations without massively expanding their billing headcount.
“Pledge Health was built to automate the hardest and most manual parts of pre-service financial workflows, especially where APIs don’t exist and teams are forced into payer portals and workarounds,” said Shreya Jagarlamudi, Co-Founder and CEO of Pledge Health. “By joining Collectly, we can scale that capability inside a platform that already owns the patient financial experience end-to-end.”
