Sohar Health

Alumni Q&A

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

The two founders met at Quit Genius (YC W18), where Lucas Gordon served as CTO and Chief Information Security Officer and Dr. Ashish Mandavia was EMEA Commercial Director. Gordon holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of London, had built integrations with over 100 employers including Evernorth and a Fortune 10 customer, and led Quit Genius through SOC-2 and HITRUST work. Mandavia is a former UK NHS doctor who moved into digital health as a product manager and later worked in commercial roles and strategy consulting at Simon Kucher and Partners on reimbursement and market access.

How did you decide to apply to Y Combinator? What was your experience applying, going through the batch, and fundraising at demo day?

The founders applied to YC drawing on their earlier growth ambitions from Quit Genius, and credit the program and their peers with accelerating the company by roughly 12 months over 10 weeks. During the batch they built out eligibility verification for behavioral health and now run more than 60,000 eligibility checks per month; their fundraise moved faster than expected.

How have you kept in touch with the YC community and continued to use YC resources & programs since the batch ended?

Since the batch, the founders have stayed involved through in-person Bay Area events and the founder matching program, and plan to follow YC's post-batch and Series A guidance as they close their Seed round.

What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?

The founders reconnected in early 2023 after Gordon exited Quit Genius and Mandavia was on paternity leave from consulting. They started with employer eligibility verification for digital health companies, then shifted to Real Time Eligibility and Coverage of Benefits determination in behavioral health after customer discovery, raising a pre-seed round led by Concept Ventures to build their eligibility verification tool and automated AI coding feature. They booked $118K ARR over the prior two months.

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

The company addresses insurance claim denials in behavioral health, where roughly 11% of patients are denied reimbursement, often due to eligibility inaccuracies. Standard automated eligibility checks reach only 50-60% accuracy for behavioral health because they don't account for payer carve-outs to third-party insurers; the founders' checker reaches 99% accuracy and reduces denials to 2%.

What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

The founders aim to build a clearing house that connects healthcare providers and payers, reducing administrative barriers and waste so providers can focus on patient care.