Asteroid
YC W25Entrepreneur First '24San Francisco, US Β· Founded 2024 Β· 8 employees Β· 11 known investors
Asteroid provides a HIPAA-compliant platform that automates workflows across healthcare systems lacking public APIs, including EHRs, payer portals, and government registries through browser automation and AI agents. The platform reduces manual data entry and integration maintenance work for healthcare software companies and payers.
Also known as Entropy Labs Β· Asteroid AI
Founders & leadershipΒ· Y Combinator alumni (W25)
Asteroid was founded in 2024 by David Mlcoch and Joe Hewett.
Investors Β· 11
Also in the syndicate Β· 6
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Asteroid builds AI browser and computer-use agents that operate software through its user interface rather than through APIs, targeting systems that never received good programmatic interfaces. The current product is positioned as an integration layer for healthcare: a HIPAA-compliant platform connecting EHRs, payer portals, government registries, state licensing boards and legacy desktop applications from a single place, with more than 100 pre-built integrations that the company says go live in days and maintain themselves.
The platform is organized around ready-made workflows for specific healthcare and insurance operations: referral intake from voice-AI calls into practice systems, EHR record extraction, charting and write-back, referral-to-appointment scheduling, eligibility and benefits verification across primary, secondary and state payer portals with structured write-back to the EMR, insurance member enrollment back-office steps (CRM reconciliation, marketplace application, plan selection, e-signature, policy write-back), and credentialing checks against NPI, exclusion lists, license standing and DEA sources. Users build agents in a visual, graph-based canvas by writing plain-language steps or uploading screen recordings, with each step becoming a node carrying guardrails; the Astro builder generates prompts, graphs and tools from a natural-language description and helps debug failed runs. Developers invoke agents through REST APIs and SDKs, and teams supervise live sessions, review recordings and trigger human-in-the-loop escalation via Slack.
Earlier and adjacent positioning covers back-office automation beyond healthcare, including insurance quoting across carrier portals, mortgage lender portals, supply chain vendor portals, property management and vendor onboarding/compliance checks on government sites. Internal records also describe an earlier product framing as a runtime supervision layer for AI agents, providing policy enforcement, behavior monitoring and SDK integration.
Founding story
Asteroid was founded in 2024 by David Mlcoch (co-founder and CEO) and Joe Hewett (co-founder and CTO). Mlcoch's background includes AI study at Edinburgh University, autonomous agents as co-founder and CTO of Trident AI, robotics work (CTU, NTU, TAU) and space (EUSPA, SpaceKnow). One third-party profile describes the idea originating from observing manual data entry, form filling and portal navigation in regulated industries where legacy systems and missing APIs blocked traditional automation, with early traction from insurance and healthcare customers; the same source states the technology was tested for six months before public launch.
Business model
Asteroid sells B2B SaaS browser and computer-use automation on a consumption-based subscription model, with monthly fees that include buckets of agent-minutes and pricing tiers scaling from individual users to enterprise teams running thousands of parallel automations. Sacra reports an unlimited-user model in which credits/consumption serve as the primary expansion lever as customers automate more workflows. The company positions between developer-focused browser infrastructure and expensive enterprise RPA suites, and offers prebuilt integrations and workflow templates that shorten implementation.
Consumption-based subscription: monthly fees bundling agent-minutes, tiered from individual users to enterprise teams, with usage-based credits driving expansion revenue as customers add workflows and run agents more frequently.
Traction
Company-published figures include 100+ healthcare and operations teams, 100+ automated healthcare portals, 250+ production agents and 700,000+ cumulative executions as of July 2026, and 5,000+ production browser agents built. Workflow-level figures cited from production deployments: 16,000 referral-intake requests per month across 80+ practices at 99.6% completion; 37,000 EHR records per month across 11 EHRs at 77 seconds per record; 200,000+ member-enrollment runs at a health-insurance call center; and a 2,000-referral backlog cleared in two weeks. A YC launch post cited more than 25 businesses using the agents. Product Hunt shows two launches, 1.2K followers and a 5.0 rating from 5 reviews.
Latest developments
The most recent published items are Asteroid Integrate (July 2026), a catalog of prebuilt integrations to EHRs, payer portals and government systems reporting 250+ production agents and 700,000+ executions with HIPAA compliance and SOC 2 Type II; an August 2026 post with Anthropic on making Claude computer use production-ready in healthcare; and a May 2026 Product Hunt launch covering browser, Linux and Windows agents. Earlier in 2026 the company shipped Astro (January) and Asteroid 2.0 Gen 2 agents (April), and published material on building 5,000+ production browser agents.
βΈFull profile β market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies
Market position
Sacra positions Asteroid in the middle market between developer-focused browser infrastructure providers (Browserbase, Hyperbrowser) and enterprise RPA incumbents (UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism) whose implementations are cited at $50,000+ with consultant support, while noting commoditization risk from foundation-model vendors adding native computer use (OpenAI ChatGPT Agent, Google Project Mariner/Gemini Enterprise, Anthropic Computer Use). The company's own site claims 100+ healthcare and operations teams as users and 100+ automated healthcare portals.
Third-party analysis and the company's own material cite a hybrid execution approach that combines DOM/Playwright automation with vision models, allowing agents to reason through unexpected popups and layout changes while generating reusable deterministic scripts from initial AI-driven runs (cited as cutting a task from three minutes to 20 seconds on repeats, and one workflow from six minutes to 67 seconds with Gen 2 agents). Other stated differentiators are a no-code, graph-based builder usable by non-technical operations staff, built-in guardrails, evaluations, backtesting and human-in-the-loop oversight, encrypted credential and 2FA vaulting, isolated cloud Chromium instances, HIPAA compliance and SOC 2 Type II, and a catalog of pre-built healthcare portal integrations rather than customer-built automations.
Technology
Agents run in isolated cloud Chromium instances with credentials and two-factor tokens injected from an encrypted vault, navigating sites using a hybrid of Playwright automation and computer vision. Workflows are modeled as graphs of focused nodes rather than single long prompts, providing observability, guardrails and scoped tool access; the system generates reusable Playwright scripts from initial AI-driven runs for deterministic replay. Gen 2 agents are described as having their own computer, writing code, self-healing and learning across runs. The stack also supports Linux and Windows desktop applications via screenshot-think-act computer use, live session video with chat intervention, evaluations and backtesting, and REST API/SDK access. Anthropic's Claude models are used for computer use in healthcare workflows.
Go-to-market
Self-serve sign-up and book-a-demo motions from the website, developer/SDK distribution, and product-led launches on Product Hunt (August 2025 and May 2026). The company publishes technical guides and customer case studies on its blog, ran a Y Combinator founder promotion offering 12 months free in October 2025, and markets an Anthropic case study. Sacra notes an API-first design allowing agents to be embedded in voice agents and chatbots, with voice-AI vendors as a channel for the last-mile data-entry problem.
Healthcare software companies, payers and clinical operations teams (voice-AI healthcare vendors, clinic automation platforms, AI intake and referral companies, specialty clinic platforms, health-insurance call centers), plus insurance brokers and carriers, mortgage brokers, supply chain and property management operators, and vendor onboarding/compliance teams. Buyers include both non-technical operations staff and developers.
Geography
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. Workflows described are largely US-specific (US payer portals, state licensing boards, DEA and NPI registries, health insurance marketplace applications).
History
The company was founded in 2024 by David Mlcoch and Joe Hewett and is based in San Francisco. It participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch (running January to March 2025) and raised a single reported $500K round around March-April 2025. Its earliest positioning was browser workflow automation with human oversight for regulated industries; subsequent launches include a first Product Hunt launch in August 2025, the Astro agent builder (January 2026), Asteroid 2.0 / Gen 2 agents (April 2026), a second Product Hunt launch in May 2026, and Asteroid Integrate, a catalog of prebuilt healthcare portal integrations, in July 2026. Published case studies with Delfa (clinical trial system data entry, October 2025) and Meshed (insurance quoting across 50+ carrier platforms, September 2025) document early customer deployments, and an August 2026 post describes joint work with Anthropic on production computer use in healthcare.
Risks & controversies
Sacra identifies competitive risk that foundation-model and cloud providers embed browser/computer control natively, commoditizing the automation layer, and notes competition from both browser infrastructure specialists and incumbent RPA vendors. Operating in HIPAA-regulated healthcare workflows using credentialed logins to third-party portals creates compliance, credential-security and reliability exposure; the platform's own materials reference exception rates and the need for evaluations and human-in-the-loop review. Sources also differ on basic facts (round date and stage, headcount of 4 vs 8 vs 1-10), and much of the performance data originates from the company's own website and blog rather than independent verification.
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources β announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed β not independently audited.
Timeline Β· 11
launches, deals, and filingsAsteroid and Anthropic published work on making Claude computer use production-ready in healthcare, covering engineering around legacy EHRs and workflows running at scale; Asteroid's homepage highlights an Anthropic feature/case study.
A catalog of prebuilt integrations to EHRs, payer portals and government systems lacking APIs, described as having 250+ agents live in production and 700,000+ executions, HIPAA compliant and SOC 2 Type II.
Second Product Hunt launch positioning Asteroid as a builder for browser, Linux and Windows computer-use agents.
Gen 2 agents are given their own computer, write code, self-heal and learn over time; the company reports cutting one workflow from six minutes to 67 seconds.
Astro converts plain-English descriptions into browser-agent workflows and assists in debugging failed runs by treating the agent graph as a codebase.
Asteroid announced 12 months free of its platform for YC founders building production browser agents on legacy portals without APIs.
Case study describing Delfa automating data entry into legacy clinical trial systems with Asteroid browser agents, stated as live in 30 minutes with no APIs.
Case study stating Meshed cut insurance quoting time by 93% by automating 50+ carrier platforms, turning hours of manual work into 3-minute quotes.
Launched on Product Hunt as 'AI browser agents for your back office, built in seconds'.
Asteroid raised a $500K round; Startup Intros dates it March 2025 and lists Y Combinator among investors, while Sacra describes it as a $500K pre-seed round in April 2025 led by Y Combinator. It is the company's only known funding round.
$500K source β
Asteroid was part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, which Sacra states ran from January through March 2025.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
In the news
NASA Study Finds Near-Earth Asteroid Is Actually Comet - NASAnasa.gov Β· Jul 2026βΈResearch sources Β· 8
primary sources listed
- Asteroidasteroid.ai Β· web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Asteroid do?
- Asteroid builds HIPAA-compliant AI browser and computer-use agents that integrate EHRs, payer portals and legacy systems lacking APIs.
- Who founded Asteroid?
- Asteroid was founded by David Mlcoch, Joe Hewett in 2024.
- Who are Asteroid's investors?
- Asteroid's investors include Entrepreneur First, MITON, MyAsiaVC, Transpose Platform Management, Y Combinator.
- Where is Asteroid headquartered?
- Asteroid is headquartered in San Francisco, US.