We recently announced a significant growth investment from SEVA, with SEVA’s founder and Managing Partner Shalin Mehta joining our Board of Directors. Beyond the press release, we wanted to share some of our reflections and excitement on how the Serif Health team got to this milestone, why we chose to work with SEVA, and what comes next (hint: a lot)!
It has been five years since the first price transparency requirements went live for hospitals and four years since Transparency in Coverage requirements started for health plans. We have made significant progress making this data usable and useful for healthcare providers, analysts, and patients. Yet we are still in the early innings of true price transparency in healthcare. There is so much more to accomplish. More regulation is imminent to potentially mandate prescription drug reimbursement disclosures and expand reporting requirements for labs, imaging, and surgery centers. Employers are starting to use this data in new ways to shape healthcare decisions for their employees. And patients are still waiting for a world in which they have easy options to know the price of their healthcare before they actually step foot in the office or hospital.
Serif Health has built one of the best platforms and just as importantly, one of the best customer-focused teams, in healthcare price transparency and we knew this was the right time to demonstrate not only our progress thus far, but also our focus and determination to build for the challenging but exciting future.
The Serif Story
We could have raised this round of funding earlier in our journey. In the years since finishing Y Combinator and raising our seed, we have fielded many pitches from investors to raise a substantial Series A round. Instead, we chose to spend our time on developing the right products for the right customers and building a profitable company so that we would never actually need outside capital unless the partnership and opportunity were truly compelling.
Making price transparency data usable has been the core of our work — cleaning, standardizing, and enhancing hundreds of payers, thousands of hospitals, and billions of rate records every single month, so that our customers across the healthcare ecosystem can view and analyze prices, evaluate their networks, and understand how their market is actually moving.
That kind of work is easy to underinvest in — once you solve one problem in the data, you discover five new data quality issues in the process. There is a constant temptation to call a dataset "good enough" and move on to something more visible. We didn't have that option. Our customers were relying on the accuracy of what we shipped every month, and our revenue depended on getting it right, not on how the roadmap looked in a pitch deck. Growing our customer revenue meant every dollar we spent had to be justified by what the business needed next. These constraints have made our data foundation stronger than ever. If we had chosen to raise earlier, investor concerns about getting more “proprietary data” or building more “adjacent products and solutions” to chase higher growth would have changed our path dramatically.
As we established our foundation and reputation as the company who cared the most about the quality, accuracy, and usability of price transparency data, we did not want to raise capital for the sake of raising capital. We would only do so if we found a partner whose own approach matched how we'd already built the company — founder-led, obsessed with customers rather than with narrative, and showed that they truly understood and cared about our vision and approach. Enter Shalin and Roshan at SEVA.
The Serif + SEVA story
Over the years, we have interacted with hundreds of investment funds of all stripes (VC, PE, Growth Equity, Family Offices, etc.). They distinguish themselves through their strong reputations, industry expertise, successful portfolio companies, in-house services, etc., but the process is often relatively uniform. Finding the right fit and relationships are critical. SEVA showed us how they were different via the specificity of their initial outreach emphasizing their understanding of companies at the intersection of healthcare and data, lack of red tape and traditional hierarchies, truly flexible check size and investment structure, as well as the value they placed on customer-centricity and the time they put in to get to know us as people even if we chose not to fundraise at all. As we got to know them, we found SEVA to be kindred spirits in their investment process and approach to supporting entrepreneurs. Instead of just looking for best-in-class financial metrics, they deeply focused on how customers actually use our products, gave nuanced product feedback, and displayed their expertise in helping other healthcare data businesses accelerate differentiation and build new verticals. And with a smaller fund size and inaugural fund, SEVA, like Serif, has to choose its bets wisely. This made working with SEVA the right move at the right time.
How the Story Continues
We are at an inflection point in the push for price transparency in healthcare. Price transparency and cost intelligence have, at times, been treated as a compliance footnote rather than a real category. This is changing dramatically, and the timing of our fundraising is a strong signal of the shift underway. More than 250 organizations have built Serif Health into how they price, contract, and surface cost estimates, and that adoption existed well before we ever needed to raise a dollar to prove it was real. And new customer categories are continuing to emerge – especially among employers and companies building tools directly for patients. Building with intention for this moment was a healthier way for Serif Health and the broader category to mature.
None of this means the work is close to done, which brings us to what’s next. This capital goes toward two things: expanding our sales and go-to-market teams and continuing to build out our product and data roadmap. Earlier this year we launched Signal Ask, which lets users query pricing data in plain language instead of needing to know billing codes or dataset structures ahead of time. It's the first real step in a broader effort to make this data not just accurate but genuinely usable for anyone, and over 2026 and 2027 we expect that effort to keep showing up in concrete ways: more ways to access the data, more of the manual translation work removed from the process, a platform that keeps pace with how our customers actually want to work and closer to a world where we all clearly know and understand healthcare prices and start to get costs under control.
For any founders out there fundraising or thinking about fundraising, think about the type of company you want to build. Sometimes fundraising early and often is the path to success, but that path is often dictated by a playbook and requires leaning into the dominant narratives of the day without necessarily having defined what you truly want or need yet (Marketplaces! Augmented Reality! Crypto! AI!).
But in cases like ours, you can take a different path. By taking the time to build a sustainable business, raising later allows you to bring on a partner who fits the company you have already built, rather than the other way around.
We are excited to continue the next chapter of Serif Health alongside SEVA – and now it’s back to work! Much more to come!
-Rafiq & Matt