NEW YORK, NY—Somewhere on the eighth floor of a building on West 27th Street, a fax machine is not ringing. That’s the point. In most specialty medical practices across the country, fax machines still handle the bulk of prior authorization requests—the insurance paperwork that must be completed before a patient can begin treatment. At Silna Health, the company founded by Jeffrey Morelli, Pavel Asparouhov, and Sagar Jajoo in August 2023, the goal is to make that entire process invisible.

Silna’s AI-powered Care Readiness Platform now supports more than 150,000 patients nationwide, works with over 1,000 payors across 45-plus states, and has cut insurance approval times from weeks to roughly four hours—with a 99.8% authorization success rate. The company has raised $27 million in total funding, a $5 million seed and a $22 million Series A, both co-led by Accel and Bain Capital Ventures, with angel participation from the co-founders of Ramp, Opendoor, Truework, Eight Sleep, and Speak.

None of the three founders came from healthcare. All of them came from fintech. And that, it turns out, is exactly why the product works.

A Nurse’s Son, a Berkeley Dropout, and a First PM

Morelli is the son of a nurse who spent 40 years delivering care across nearly every corner of the healthcare system—from the newborn ICU to a ski hill medical station to a diabetes coordination program. For 35 of those years, she loved the work. For the final five, the paperwork consumed her. By the end of her career, she was spending more time fighting insurance bureaucracy than treating patients.

“My mom was passionate and happy for the first 35 years of her career. For the remaining five, she was frustrated with the increasingly complex system that left care providers to tackle mountains of paperwork after hours, or fight an uphill battle for pay and patient advocacy.”

— Jeffrey Morelli, Co-Founder & CEO

Before Silna, Morelli was the first sales hire at Truework, an income and employment verification startup, where he rose from account executive to director of sales to head of data partnerships over five years. Before that, he ran sales at Nightingale, an autism healthcare technology company—his first brush with the ABA industry and the administrative dysfunction that defines it. He studied at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business.Pavel Asparouhov grew up in the same neighborhood as Morelli in Salt Lake City. He enrolled at UC Berkeley, dropped out after his sophomore year, and joined Ramp as a software engineering intern in May 2020. By the time he left three years later, he’d been promoted to staff software engineer and built the team responsible for Bill Pay, Payments, Procurement, Vendor Management, and Workflow Automation—products processing billions of dollars annually. In 2024, he was named a Thiel Fellow, the prestigious program that provides $100,000 to young founders building companies instead of finishing degrees.

Sagar Jajoo, the third co-founder and COO, also connected with Morelli at Truework, where he was the first product manager and eventually built the entire product organization. Before Truework, Jajoo managed Blend’s suite of financial technology products serving major lenders like Wells Fargo, learning firsthand how to apply technology to complex, regulated workflows. He holds a double major in computer science and economics from UC Berkeley and also serves as an angel investor and scout for Bain Capital Ventures.

19 Months in Stealth, Two Meanings, One Name

The company’s name carries a dual etymology that captures its ambition. According to Bain Capital Ventures, “Silna” comes from Bulgarian—Asparouhov’s native language—meaning “strong.” According to Accel, the lead seed investor, it derives from the Urdu word meaning “sewn,” reflecting the company’s mission to stitch together fragmented billing workflows. Both readings fit.

For 19 months after incorporating in August 2023, the team built in near-total silence—no press coverage, no public launch, no social media presence. They emerged in March 2025 with $27 million already raised, a platform already operational in dozens of clinics, and more than 50,000 patients already served. By early 2026, that number had tripled to 150,000.

The stealth period was intentional. As Morelli has said, healthcare companies that lead with hype tend to overpromise and underdeliver. Silna chose to lead with results.

From 30 Minutes to 30 Seconds

The problem Silna targets is administrative waste—specifically, the nearly $500 billion spent annually in the United States on excessive healthcare administrative workflows. Prior authorization, the process by which providers confirm insurance coverage before delivering care, is the most manual, error-prone, and delay-causing step in the revenue cycle. The American Medical Association has reported that 93% of physicians say prior authorization barriers have led to patient harm. In 78% of cases, patients abandon treatment entirely because of authorization struggles.

Silna’s Care Readiness Platform operates across three core functions. First, it manages the entire prior authorization lifecycle—tracking upcoming expirations, sending weekly reminders, submitting requests, and handling follow-ups and escalations. Second, it performs specialty-specific benefit checks, verifying coverage details, accumulations, authorization requirements, and visit limits to generate accurate patient cost estimates. Third, it provides ongoing insurance monitoring, regularly checking that each patient’s plan is still active, flagging lost coverage, and detecting new insurance plans.

The platform operates across eight different insurance portals and has reduced the time required for pre-visit insurance verification from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. Approval turnaround has dropped from weeks to roughly four hours. The system uses a payer-tuned rules engine that adapts to each payor’s specific submission requirements, a PDF generation engine that formats documentation to meet those requirements, and a hybrid AI-plus-human model where artificial intelligence handles roughly 90% of low-complexity tasks and flags edge cases for human review.

In January 2026, Silna launched Predictive Document Intelligence, its first AI-powered capability designed to prevent prior authorization denials before they occur. The system evaluates whether clinical documentation meets payer- and specialty-specific requirements—assessing common denial drivers across assessment standards, clinician credentials, outcome measures, and diagnosis coding—before an authorization is even filed.

Why ABA Is Ground Zero

While Silna serves providers across physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, senior living, psychiatry, and cardiac rehabilitation, Applied Behavior Analysis therapy has become one of its most critical verticals. ABA providers face some of the toughest authorization processes in healthcare—evolving payer documentation rules, recurring reauthorizations, a stretched administrative workforce, and wildly variable requirements across states and payors. What one Medicaid plan accepts may differ entirely from another.

The company has published case studies with ABA-adjacent clients that illustrate the scale of the problem. AnswersNow, one of the nation’s fastest-growing virtual ABA therapy providers, partnered with Silna in April 2025 and saw a 76% reduction in authorization turnaround time—from 29 days to under seven—and a 79% reduction in submission time, from 14 days to three. Behavior One Autism Solutions reported that eligibility verification alone had previously required two to three staff members spending six to eight hours on phone calls per client.

Silna is a partner of the Behavioral Health Center of Excellence (BHCOE) and was named a 2026 G2 Best Software Award winner in both the Best Healthcare Software Products and Fastest Growing Products categories. It currently holds the #1 rating for prior authorization solutions on G2, with a 4.7 out of 5 score.

Desks Get Moved, Ideas Get Built

The founding team has recruited engineers and operators from Headway, Palantir, Square, and other high-growth technology companies. Silna maintains an in-office culture at its New York headquarters—part of a broader trend among AI-native startups that prize speed and real-time collaboration.

Morelli holds one-on-one meetings with every new hire at the end of their first week and asks a single question: what’s one thing that should be changed to improve the company? When a new product manager suggested he should sit next to the engineering team instead of across the office, Morelli got up and rearranged the desks himself. Twenty-five percent of Silna’s new customers come from provider referrals—clinicians who used the platform and told their peers.

“Every day, Americans are forced to wait weeks or months for critical medical treatments while insurance paperwork piles up on fax machines. We’re bringing modern technology to a broken system that hasn’t changed since the 1970s.”

— Jeffrey Morelli

$27 Million and the Bet on Front-End RCM

The investor thesis is straightforward. Accel partner Amit Kumar has noted that Silna’s founding team brings a rare combination of financial automation expertise and high-growth scaling experience to an entrenched healthcare problem. Bain Capital Ventures partner Kevin Zhang has pointed to the evolving tension between payors, patients, and providers as creating demand for exactly this kind of technology—tools that expedite coverage decisions so patients get timely treatment, insurance dollars flow appropriately, and physicians can focus on care.

The regulatory environment is moving in Silna’s direction. The CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule, which took effect January 1, 2026, now requires payors to respond to urgent prior authorization requests within 72 hours and standard requests within seven calendar days. That mandate has increased the consequences of incomplete documentation at submission—and made Silna’s document intelligence capabilities more relevant than ever.

For ABA providers specifically, Silna occupies a unique position. It doesn’t require deep integration with existing practice management or EHR systems. The platform sits alongside the existing tech stack, is staff-facing, and deploys in minutes rather than months. In a field where most platforms demand long implementation cycles and dedicated IT support, that lightweight deployment model is a genuine competitive advantage.

Stitching It Together

The three founders share a common conviction: healthcare’s administrative crisis won’t be solved by demonizing any single party—insurers, providers, or the system itself. It will be solved by technology that earns trust from all three. Silna’s NPS score of 89 suggests they’re not just building software; they’re building relationships.

When your CEO’s first job was selling technology for an autism healthcare company, your CTO dropped out of Berkeley to build billion-dollar payment systems at Ramp, and your COO cut his teeth verifying every piece of financial data at Truework and Blend—the throughline isn’t healthcare experience. It’s the instinct that messy, high-stakes data problems are the ones most worth solving. Prior authorization just happens to be one of the messiest.

Founders
Jeffrey Morelli: Co-Founder & CEO — linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-morelli
Pavel Asparouhov: Co-Founder & CTO — linkedin.com/in/pavel-asparouhov
Sagar Jajoo: Co-Founder & COO — linkedin.com/in/jajoosagar

Investors
Series A ($22M): Co-led by Accel and Bain Capital Ventures
Seed ($5M): Led by Accel and Bain Capital Ventures
Angel Investors: Co-founders of Ramp, Opendoor, Truework, Eight Sleep, Speak

Industry Recognition
G2: 2026 Best Software Award — Best Healthcare Software & Fastest Growing Products
G2 Rating: #1 Prior Authorization Solution, 4.7/5
BHCOE: Partner — Behavioral Health Center of Excellence
Thiel Fellowship: Pavel Asparouhov, 2024 Thiel Fellow

Key Metrics
Patients Supported: 150,000+
Payors: 1,000+ across 45+ states
Authorization Success Rate: 99.8%
Pre-visit Verification: Reduced from 30 minutes to 30 seconds
Approval Turnaround: Reduced from weeks to ~4 hours
NPS Score: 89