Healthcare providers across the country are slipping into the red as they grapple with ongoing financial pressures, including shrinking reimbursement rates and climbing supply costs.
This week, a startup offering a tech platform to help providers better manage their finances raised millions of dollars in an effort to help address this crisis. The New York City-based company, called Translucent AI, raised $7 million in a seed round that included investors NEA, Virtue, FPV Ventures and Redesign Health.
The startup, founded last year, got its name from its founders’ belief that financial operations in healthcare should be clear and actionable, said Translucent CEO Jack O’Hara.
“Most healthcare finance teams are buried under layers of complexity and manual work, making it nearly impossible to see what’s really driving performance. Translucent is about cutting through that fog. Our AI doesn’t just surface data — it brings clarity to decisions that were once hidden behind spreadsheets, dashboards, and disconnected systems,” he stated.
He added that most healthcare finance teams are overwhelmed and spend most of their time just trying to find and clean up data instead of analyzing it or using it to make better decisions.
Translucent’s financial analysis platform not only uses AI to track finances across a provider’s various service lines, but it also allows hospital leaders to ask questions — almost like a ChatGPT for provider finances.
For example, the platform can answer questions like, “What are the largest drivers of expenses for orthopedics this month?” or, “How does our payer mix impact our margins by service line?” O’Hara explained.
“Translucent is like having a dedicated 24/7 financial analyst who instantly understands your healthcare organization’s unique data and structure. When an operator asks a financial question, like ‘Why are costs up in cardiology this month?’ Translucent translates that plain-language question into a smart data query. Behind the scenes, our AI pulls from multiple systems like your general ledger, revenue cycle, EHR, and payer contracts to find the right answers.” he declared.
He also highlighted that the platform remembers each organization’s specific terms, logic and past conversations, so it gets smarter over time.
As for Translucent’s competitors, O’Hara acknowledged that there are a lot of companies out there also promising to improve providers’ financial management. Some of these offer legacy financial planning tools that weren’t designed with healthcare in mind, while others provide enterprise resource planning systems that aren’t built to take advantage of AI, he said.
“Most of these platforms are geared toward power users in finance or people who are fluent in spreadsheets and financial modeling, but not the broader team. Translucent is different because it is AI-native, built for healthcare and built for the non-super user,” O’Hara remarked.
Whether Translucent can help turn the tide for struggling providers remains to be seen, but its backers are betting that clearer financial insights could mean the difference between sinking deeper into the red and finding a sustainable path forward.
Photo: Andriy Onufriyenko, Getty Images
