On Tuesday, a startup aiming to help healthcare practices better manage their financial and back-office operations announced that it has raised $187 million in capital in the past six months.
Nitra, which launched in 2024, has now raised a total of $205 million in capital and $90 million in equity. Some of its investors include Actions Capital, Comma Capital, Hyphen Capital, Mana Ventures, Necessary Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Pantera Capital, Sazze Partners and Soma Capital.
The New York-based startup — which has offices in Washington, D.C. and Taipei — is seeking to make administrative work easier for healthcare practices. Most practices still rely on a patchwork of disconnected systems to manage their payments, scheduling, supplies, insurance verification and inventory tracking, noted Jonathan Chen, co-founder and president of Nitra.
“That fragmentation creates a lot of manual work for clinics and takes time away from patient care. Our goal with Nitra is to bring those operational workflows into a single platform so practices can manage their back office more efficiently,” he stated.
In his view, Nitra’s platform combines most of the moving parts involved in running a healthcare practice. Instead of switching between multiple systems, clinics can manage payments, procurement, inventory, scheduling and insurance verification through one platform.
Behind the scenes, AI helps automate much of this work, Chen added.
“For example, it can help handle purchasing from suppliers by having AI hunting for the best prices, it can reduce time spent in accounting systems by automatically categorizing expenses, and voice AI can automatically check insurance eligibility with payers or manage scheduling conversations with patients,” he remarked.
Chen stressed that the goal isn’t to replace staff — but rather to reduce the amount of repetitive administrative work that they are forced to do every day.
More than 700 clinics currently use the platform.
“Nitra’s platform today is free for physicians. The platform includes financial tools like expense cards, bill pay and payment processing, as well as procurement and operational workflows. As practices run more of their operations through the platform, Nitra earns transaction and merchant fees tied to those services and transaction activity processed across the system,” Chen explained.
To him, the key value that Nitra provides is saved time for staff members. By allowing physicians and other employees to spend less time on back-office work, Nitra can free up people to focus more on patient care.
“Our view is that healthcare practices don’t just need another tool. They need a platform that ties the operational side of their business together,” Chen declared.
Photo: Tom Werner, Getty Images
