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In May 2026, Connie Loizos reported for TechCrunch on a problem nearly every patient has faced: why it’s so hard to get a call back from a doctor’s office, especially when you’re waiting on a referral. The challenge isn’t just about a shortage of medical professionals. The real bottleneck often happens after a primary care doctor refers a patient to a specialist. That referral process, which should be routine, is instead full of delays and administrative hurdles.
Kaled Alhanafi and Chetan Patel, who together founded Basata in Phoenix two years ago, both experienced this frustration firsthand. Patel, who spent a decade building cardiac devices at Medtronic, described how his wife fainted on a flight with their children. Although he had expertise in cardiology and medical devices, the process to get her the right specialist care took far longer than he expected. He cited the “care gap,” the difference between available medical expertise and the ability to access it efficiently.
Kaled Alhanafi, a former executive at Lyft and Cruise, had a similar experience with his father. After a serious carotid artery diagnosis, his father was referred to three cardiology groups. According to Alhanafi, only one of those groups called back within a couple of weeks. One responded only after the surgery had already taken place, and the third never called at all.
Alhanafi explained that, in specialty practices, administrative teams are buried under hundreds or even thousands of incoming faxes. Most referrals still arrive by fax, despite advances in medical technology. A small administrative staff must process all of those documents, which leads to delays. It’s not that practices don’t want to schedule patients. It’s that they can’t get through the intake backlog quickly enough, resulting in lost patients.
Basata’s solution combines document processing with AI-enabled phone outreach. When a referral arrives, even by fax, Basata’s system reads and processes the document, extracts relevant clinical details, and then an AI voice agent contacts the patient directly to schedule the appointment. Patients can also call the practice at any time and interact with the AI agent, which can answer questions or handle routine administrative needs like prescription renewals. Alhanafi said some patients are audibly surprised to get a call so quickly after their referral, sometimes before they’ve even left the parking lot.
The company chose to integrate with the electronic medical record systems that specific specialties use, starting with cardiology and then expanding to urology. The founders explained that they’ve avoided moving into new specialties until they’re confident they can handle the unique workflows. They even turned down a large deal in a specialty they hadn’t yet mapped thoroughly, prioritizing quality over rapid expansion.
Basata’s revenue model is usage-based. Practices pay per document processed and per call handled, not per user or seat. The company reported that it had processed referrals for about 500,000 patients as of May 2026. Of those, roughly 100,000 referrals came in the previous month alone, indicating a rapid acceleration.
The company raised $24.5 million in total, including a recent $21 million Series A round. The lead investor was Lan Xuezhao of Basis Set Ventures. Xuezhao began her career as a PhD researcher modeling the human brain, later working in corporate strategy at McKinsey and Dropbox before moving into venture capital. Cowboy Ventures, founded by Aileen Lee, also invested in Basata’s Series A, as did Victoria Treyger, a former general partner at Felicis Ventures. Treyger invested through her new venture firm, Sofeon, making Basata its first portfolio company.
Basata is not alone in this market. Tennr, a New York-based startup founded in 2021, has raised over $160 million from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Lightspeed, and Google Ventures. Tennr is now valued at $605 million. The company focuses on document intelligence and has developed proprietary language models trained on tens of millions of medical documents.
Assort Health is another competitor, backed by Lightspeed. It specializes in automating patient phone communication for specialty practices. In the previous year, Assort Health raised funding at a valuation of $750 million.
Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures noted that trust is a key differentiator in the healthcare AI market. She pointed out that many venture capitalists invest in young entrepreneurs straight out of high school or college, but that selling to medical practices requires a different approach. According to Lee, doctors want to look a founder in the eye and know they can rely on them, especially when systems are handling sensitive patient information.
Basata claims its competitive edge comes from offering an end-to-end workflow tailored to specific specialties. This means the company handles both document processing and patient communication, rather than specializing in just one part of the process. The founders believe this integrated approach is more effective for the unique challenges of specialty medicine, though they acknowledge it may be harder to sustain if better-funded competitors expand their product offerings.
The administrative staff who interact with Basata’s system often have decades of experience and deep knowledge of the work. According to Alhanafi, these staff members are generally not worried about being replaced by AI. Instead, they’re concerned about being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work. He described situations where no reasonable amount of hiring could keep pace with the paperwork and phone calls. The company frames its system as a way to free up human administrators from the most repetitive parts of their jobs, allowing them to focus on tasks that require more expertise.
Alhanafi reported that 70% of Basata’s new deals now come through word of mouth rather than outbound sales, indicating that administrative teams and practices are recommending the system to peers after experiencing improvements.
Lan Xuezhao’s career prior to Basis Set Ventures began with academic research into the human brain, which informed her approach to investing in AI companies like Basata. Xuezhao moved into corporate strategy roles at McKinsey and Dropbox before launching Basis Set Ventures and leading Basata’s $21 million Series A round.
Victoria Treyger, who invested in Basata through Sofeon, was previously a general partner at Felicis Ventures. Sofeon’s investment in Basata marked the firm’s first deal.
Tennr, the New York-based rival, claims its language models are trained on tens of millions of medical documents, a scale that allows for advanced document analysis and automation in healthcare.
Assort Health, with a $750 million valuation, has focused its technology on automating phone communication for specialty practices, addressing one of the main choke points in patient scheduling.
Basata was co-founded by Chetan Patel, Kaled Alhanafi, and Vivin Paliath, who serves as CTO. The three founders bring backgrounds spanning medical device engineering, ride-hailing technology, and software development.
When Basata’s AI phone agent contacts patients, some are so surprised by the speed and clarity of the process that their reactions are captured in audio recordings. The company sees this as evidence that administrative friction has become normalized, and that patients have come to expect delays, not rapid responses.
The company’s name, Basata, is associated with the founders’ belief that healthcare systems can be made simpler and more accessible through targeted automation, though the company remains cautious about expanding too quickly into new areas of medicine.
In specialty practices, most referrals still arrive by fax, even in 2026, highlighting the gap between clinical and administrative technology adoption.
Basata’s most recent figures indicate it handled about 100,000 referrals in a single month, which is equivalent to the population of a mid-sized American city.