Last year, Chris Heckler was ending a five-year hiatus after selling his last company, a health care startup. “I was on the sidelines doing angel investing and realized I was too young to retire,” he told TechCrunch. “I wanted to get back to normal.”
At the same time, Joseph Akintlayo had just sold his fintech company. He wasn’t in the competition either, but was thinking about ideas for the company. Akintlayo knew Heckler because he had previously served as an advisor on one of his projects.
But during this downtime, they joined forces, Heckler with his connections and Akintlayo with his knowledge of AI and supply chain, to build something new.
The result was SpendRule, launched last summer as an AI-powered platform that helps health systems track spending. The company emerged from stealth on Tuesday with a $2 million round led by Abundant Venture Partners. Other investors in the round include MemorialCare Innovation Fund and Zeal Capital Partners.
Currently, health systems use three-way matching to link purchases to invoices when products have barcodes, said Akintlayo, the company’s chief technology officer. However, health system purchases and contracts (such as maintenance, housekeeping, translation services, cleaning, etc.) often do not have barcodes or easily identifiable purchase receipts.
These types of purchases are often difficult and complex to manage, so overspending is very common. SpendRule is a technology that ensures hospitals only pay what is agreed upon in their contracts. It integrates with and operates on top of the hospital system’s current enterprise resource planning software, contract management software, and accounts payable workflows, pulling information from contracts, invoices, internal databases, and vendor data to validate invoices before payment is made.
Flag discrepancies and tell your team when to pay and when not to pay. Hospitals typically hire auditors to perform this function or manually review each bill every two years. This was a tedious task that should have been automated in the current wave of AI. Already, major companies such as Kettering Health, MemorialCare and MUSC Health are using the platform, Akintlayo said.
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Heckler and Akintolayo only founded the company last summer, but thanks in large part to Heckler’s industry connections, they managed to close the round by Halloween. “We successfully completed the first round and were able to use it to grow our team to support our customers,” he said. The new capital will be used to continue hiring and developing the company’s AI infrastructure.
Heckler said SpendRule considers existing bill auditing agencies such as SpendMend and GHX to be competitors. But Akintlayo reiterated that one of the main differences is that SpendRule focuses on purchasing services, the type of goods that hospitals purchase that don’t have barcodes.
“Our goal is to build a more resilient hospital system,” Akintlayo said. “That’s our vision: to protect everyone’s bottom line by connecting data and supporting better decision-making.”
