Forus raises $160M at a $1B valuation to use AI to help patients access expensive medications faster

Forus is emerging from stealth with $160M raised at a $1B valuation, backed by Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Accel. Sahir Jaggi, the company's founder and CEO and a former Oscar Health executive, built Forus around a single friction point: getting patients with expensive, complex conditions access to the medications they need.

The problem

Drugs for autoimmune diseases, COPD, and cancers are often unaffordable without insurance coverage or financial assistance, and the path to getting them is brutal. Patients and doctors spend weeks on phone calls, paperwork, and research just to get a prescription filled on time. Forus absorbs that process entirely, offering its platform free to doctor's offices.

“Today, we are publicly announcing for the first time our company Forus, which has raised $160,000,000 from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Excel. What we do today is we help people get access to medicine faster, easier, cheaper. Most impactful are people with high cost and complex conditions. We do all of that entirely for free.”

How it works

The product sits at the center of every transaction between doctor's offices and the rest of the healthcare system — insurers, PBMs, pharmacies — automating the navigation so clinicians can focus on patients. That includes genuinely hard agent problems: multistep, path-dependent processes with imperfect information, navigated through faxes, phone calls, and poorly designed websites. Jaggi says the company has built what is likely some of the best fax AI in existence, bidirectional, because fax remains a HIPAA-compliant and surprisingly reliable channel in the system.

The second layer is complex ML. Forus processes dozens to hundreds of pages of medical records per patient to answer precise questions about medical history across thousands of medications, diagnoses, and tens of thousands of doctors who all document and treat patients differently. The same capability that powers insurance authorization navigation also identifies whether a patient might be eligible for clinical research.

Two-sided model

The free doctor-side product is the distribution play. Forus is already approaching one-third of US doctors in its first specialty. That penetration sets up the other side of the business: partnerships with life science companies like Pfizer, Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson.

The pitch to pharma is a full loop that hasn't previously been possible. Forus can help identify the right clinical trial sites, flag patients who aren't disqualified by other medications, pinpoint which doctors treat the patients who most resemble phase-three trial responders, and use real-world data to surface new indications as a drug scales. Jaggi's goal is for Forus to become the central platform through which every step from clinical development to mass-market access runs.

Data as the core asset

Because Forus sees transactions end to end, it captures the complete picture: how a doctor made a diagnostic decision, what got stuck in the system, and what caused a medication to arrive late. That data feeds both the automation engine and the commercial intelligence Forus sells to pharma partners.

The long-term ambition is explicit. Jaggi says Forus can be "the most important company in life sciences," with a target of reaching every doctor's office and patient in the country.