3 Startups · $8.65M+ · AI + DeFi

What they're building

Insurance eligibility verification is one of the most reliably miserable parts of running a physical therapy or rehab clinic. Before a patient's first appointment, someone on the front desk has to verify whether the patient's insurance will cover treatment, what their deductible is, what their copay will be, and whether prior authorisation is required. That process involves calling payers, navigating hold queues, decoding the insurance-specific language in benefits explanations, and then manually entering everything into an EMR. At a small clinic, this can consume several hours a day. At a larger one, it requires a dedicated billing coordinator. Errors in this step cascade: if a patient is quoted the wrong out-of-pocket cost, the clinic faces angry patients and delayed payment. Pocket eliminates the process. It integrates directly with a clinic's EMR to extract patient and payer information automatically, then hits multiple insurance clearinghouses simultaneously for eligibility data. An AI medical reasoning engine processes whatever the clearinghouses return, interprets the benefits, and calculates the patient's cost responsibility. When benefits are missing or incomplete, which is common, Pocket deploys AI voice calling to contact insurance agents directly and fill in the gaps. Clinics receive a patient-friendly formatted summary of verified benefits without anyone on the desk picking up the phone.

Why this matters

Physical therapy billing is genuinely hard. PT clinics are typically small, high-patient-volume operations where billing staff are stretched thin and the cost of eligibility errors falls directly on the practice's cash flow. The problem is real, it is large, and it has not been well served by generic healthcare IT. 2048 Ventures, the lead investor, focuses on vertical AI applications in underserved sectors. Their decision to lead Pocket's pre-seed signals conviction that this specific wedge, PT and rehab clinic front-office automation, is large enough and painful enough to build a company around, and that Hannah and Ben are the right people to do it. The live customer testimonials on the Pocket website are specific: "Pocket legitimately saved us a lot of time on the phone." That is not a beta user endorsing a demo. That is a clinic operator describing a changed daily workflow. The AI voice calling capability for retrieving missing benefits is particularly defensible, it represents the hardest part of the verification workflow, the bit that requires human judgment to navigate payer-specific language, and Pocket has automated it. The infrastructure to do that at HIPAA compliance standards is a real technical moat.