Conduit Health targets DME friction points

NEW YORK – With $17 million in new funding, Conduit Health’s work is just beginning, says CEO and co-founder Natan Wise. The company, which offers primarily incontinence supplies, mobility and home safety equipment, now wants to grow its team and explore new product categories and new geographies.

Conduit Health – which has quickly grown to serve more than 50,000 patients, with a payer network that includes more than 100 health plans and nearly 90 million covered lives – launched in 2024, after Wise and co-founder Rocky Seftel saw a need for a DME-ordering experience that put the consumer first.

“We were attacking this very painful problem, which is the patient and the caregiver and the non-prescriber trying to get access to DME and HME,” he said. “Where the prescription is the very first step, if the patient is not in the same room as the doctor, this whole system kind of fails and collapses on itself. The DMEs wanted to help, but they were chasing paperwork, they were chasing orders, they were faxing. It was a horrible experience for everyone.”

At the heart of Conduit Health’s model is its CareOS (Conduit Authorization and Reimbursement Engine), an agentic AI platform that interprets and acts on complex Medicare, Medicaid and managed care rules in real time.

“We've trained the model itself,” said Wise. “The model knows, okay, this direction means this, that direction means that. It's constantly learning and updating. There's a human in the loop, but we absolutely replace humans as it relates to the back office thinking of insurance eligibility pathways. So, all of the eligibility logic, authorization logic and then billing logic exists in the platform.”

Conduit Health marries that technology with a DME ordering process modeled on e-commerce, removing the challenges and hassles of insurance processes, Wise says. With a 96% payment rate, the company has minimal risk to get patients what they need – quickly.

“We can look at a patient and what insurance they have, what they're seeking, and we can say, ‘Yeah, we’ll just get you that item,’” he said. “We just frontload that and provide the patients and consumers an A-plus, best-in-class experience, because ultimately, patients just want their things and want them quickly.”

The recent funding round – a “big vote of confidence” that Conduit Health is on the right track, Wise says – was led by Drive Capital, with participation from prior lead investors XYZ Ventures, Twelve Below, Eniac Ventures, and others, bringing the company’s total funding to $22 million.

“We found a group of investors who understand that we're trying to become the next (company) to service hundreds of millions of patients,” he said. “They understand that below the hood, (DME) is a very complicated, very archaic system that is built upon payer rules that don’t integrate very well, and that there's a depth of knowledge and lived in experience you need to be successful.”