The healthcare startup world gained a new unicorn on Tuesday, with Silicon Valley-based Solace Health closing a $130 million Series C funding round that took its valuation to more than $1 billion.
The round, led by IVP, brought Solace’s overall fundraising total to $211 million since its founding in 2021. Other investors participating in the round included Menlo Ventures, SignalFire, Torch Capital, Inspired Capital and RiverPark Ventures.
Solace is a healthcare navigation startup aiming to help patients and families find, coordinate and afford healthcare — which are often exceedingly difficult tasks in the U.S.
“We’re going after the pretty broad problem, which is that U.S. healthcare isn’t very good. It’s not a good experience for a lot of people,” said Solace CEO and Co-Founder Jeremy Gurewitz. “The friction that exists between people and getting really high quality care is just everywhere, and so we’re working to solve that problem overall.”
Gurewitz founded the company with Chief Product Officer Sara Sargent, inspired mainly by what he witnessed during the final months of his mother’s life. She had passed away from pancreatic cancer a few years before, and he had seen how Kafkaesque and stressful it was for her to seek and receive the care she needed.
And Gurewitz noted that his mother had significantly more privilege and familiarity with the healthcare system than most. She was a doctor herself, a radiologist specialized in diagnosing breast cancer, and she had access to top-tier medical institutions — and still, her healthcare journey was a nightmare.
“I wanted to start a company to help people, and I discovered healthcare advocates and saw how good they were. I think the thing that really stood out to me was that I would speak to patients that worked with healthcare advocates, and they would say, ‘I had a really great experience with the U.S. healthcare system,’ which is something that you just don’t hear very frequently,” he remarked.
The goal behind Solace is simple: to connect more people to healthcare advocates. These advocates help with tasks like scheduling appointments, finding in-network providers, understanding insurance coverage and bills, and coordinating care across multiple clinicians, Gurewitz explained. And they actually handle much of the work on a patient’s behalf, rather than simply telling patients what steps to take next.
Gurewitz described this as a “no homework” ethos — a deliberate departure from navigation services that overwhelm users with to-do lists. While plenty of care navigation companies exist, such as Accolade, Transcarent, and Quantum Health, he argued that acting directly for patients might be the only way to make progress in a system that is already exhausting to navigate.
The service is covered by Medicare and most Medicare Advantage plans nationwide, meaning most users pay little to nothing out of pocket, Gurewitz said.
As part of the intake process, patients meet with a physician on the platform, who confirms their diagnosis and helps determine how Solace can support their care — a step Gurewitz said is necessary both for clinical oversight and to meet regulatory requirements tied to Medicare coverage.
From there, patients are connected with their advocate, who works with them through text, phone calls or video visits embedded directly in the platform. Solace works with patients facing everything from basic access issues — like finding available primary care doctors or specialists — to far more complex situations involving chronic illness, medication access and high-stakes treatment decisions.
In the most severe cases, advocates help patients navigate serious bureaucratic failures, Gurewitz pointed out. He recalled one instance in which a patient came to Solace after being wrongfully kicked off an organ transplant list. Due for a kidney transplant, the patient joked that they “couldn’t wait to have a beer after all this was over.” The nurse wrote in their chart that they were an alcoholic, and they were kicked off the list.
“How do you even begin to like to approach that? So they came to Solace and worked with an advocate to go through this very cumbersome process to change the hospital chart. Once the chart was changed, then that was still just the beginning,” Gurewitz explained.
After the record was corrected, the advocate had to work with the National Organ Transplant Registry to get the patient reinstated on the transplant list. While the patient was eventually added back, they were placed at the very end of the list, despite having already waited for years — a positioning that did not accurately reflect their medical history or urgency.
Over the course of roughly three months, the advocate continued to work with the registry to correct the patient’s placement, submitting documentation, following up with administrators and pushing to ensure the case was properly reviewed. Gurewitz pointed out this process would have been nearly impossible for most patients to navigate on their own while seriously ill.
He said the company is targeting 2028 for a potential IPO as it looks to continue expanding its reach.
Photo: Helen Alderton, Getty Images
