Superdial's $15M Series A
Building the agentic present and AI clearinghouse future for healthcare
Note from Yoni: thanks all for the well wishes and congratulations on my impending nuptials (mentioned last week). I had a great weekend with my buddies upstate. Now I have another bachelor weekend starting today (my friend who’s getting married the weekend after me). Pray for me.
[AI agents] will be a clever hack to launch new marketplaces and platform and software businesses that wind up looking rather like their “Pre-AI” counterparts.
Agents talking to agents or people is dumb and expensive, but unavoidable; it shouldn’t be the end goal and it doesn’t have to be. Instead LLMs should be a bridge to turn more of the world into APIs and transaction layers.
I described it as “Jevon’s paradox for conversational AI” whereby LLMs would
dramatically lower the cost of calls to customer service (just get the agent to do it for you), which will
increase calls volumes proportionally, which in turn would
necessitate an agent on the other side to handle all that increased volume so that you could eventually
replace agent <—> agent calls with a data exchange or clearinghouse
Basically you can brute force your way to a marketplace or data product, kind of like Doordash did with restaurants (just calling in orders manually before restaurants signed up for the service to handle the volume).
Now Superdial has raised a $15M Series A from SignalFire to build the agentic present and AI clearinghouse future for healthcare providers and insurers.
Today, Superdial is helping providers and insurers automate phone calls. In the short term, life gets a lot better for providers and their admins when they outsource rote and tiresome outbound phone calls. They save money, get paid more, and can spend more time on patient care.
With enough density and closed loop agent-to-agent calls, it can flip to a network model and obviate voice calls altogether. That work is just beginning.
We seeded Superdial in 2022 and the company has now raised ≈$20M in total. The business has grown dramatically since then by helping customers improve workflows, reduce cost, and drive quality around health insurance admin.
Superdial is laser focused on doing vertical AI the right way: using it as a way to win customers and ultimately build a deeper, nfx-driven business rather than maxing out as a point solution.
Superdial was founded by Sam Schwager and Harrison Caruthers who are exceptionally gritty, high velocity, high agency. They’ve become great leaders and it’s been super fun to have a front row seat.
On a personal note, this was the first investment I made at Slow and this is now the third time I’ve backed the company. It’s been a long road and the future is always high risk/highly uncertain, but this is a great milestone.
They are hiring across engineering, sales, and design for their NY-based team.
You can watch Sam’s appearance on TPBN here - fun time starting at 2:50. And you can read more about Superdial in Fierce Healthcare, Forbes, WSJ Pro, and Axios.
I Read
Young People Face a Hiring Crisis. AI Is Making It Worse. - Derek Thompson
“The most dramatic takeaway from these conversations wasn’t that AI was clearly destroying jobs. It was something I wasn’t expecting to hear at all: AI is shattering the process of looking for jobs.” The whole article is worth reading but this has been increasingly obvious for some time.
I wrote in Feb “Just like with sales, AI-powered scale will make labor markets murkier and less efficient (more work for worse outcomes).”
10 thoughts on the NYC Mayoral Election - Better Cities
Not my own but sums up my thinking reasonably well. Catherine and Ryder also wrote it up well in the Abundance NY Substack.
OpenAI and Microsoft Duel Over AGI in High-Stakes Negotiation
Really well reported in The Information. It’s gonna be hilarious when a court has to decide whether or not we’ve achieved AGI as part of a byzantine licensening deal.
Always a great read. Thanks yoni! Good luck surviving back to back bachelor weekends.