RISA Labs Secures $3.5M to Streamline Cancer Care With AI

RISA Labs, a healthtech startup in Silicon Valley, founded by IIT Kanpur alumni Kshitij Jaggi and Kumar Shivang, has raised seed funding of USD 3.5 million to grapple with one of the oncology space's most persistent bottlenecks: slowdowns in treatment induced by the prior authorization process. The round was led by Binny Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart, and included investments from an array of firms and individuals: Oncology Ventures, General Catalyst, z21 Ventures and ODD BIRD VC.

The startup's purpose is to reduce the red tape that slows down healthcare and directly harms patients. They are starting with a product that helps with the prior authorization process, which the Mayo Clinic recently described as the most significant and universal administrative burden imposed on health care providers and patients. A lot of money and time are wasted because of these needless slowdowns. BOSS is supposed to help with that.

BOSS: An AI System Built for Flow, Not Friction

At its core, BOSS is not merely another layer of automation. It is a total rethink of how work gets done, especially in a complex, dynamic, and heavily regulated operational environment like healthcare. The BOSS system is based on a digital workforce that uses large language models (LLMs), digital twins, and reinforcement learning agents. These elements make up the BOSS architecture.

BOSS is a system for the world after ChatGPT. It expresses the fundamental shift that has occurred: we are now in a world where we not only know how to convey software instructions, but also where we must be able to express our intents to non-human intelligences that work for us. This new layer of intelligence has been built with BOSS as its first major product. It was used at a large cancer treatment center in the U.S. to help reduce the time it took to get prior authorization for certain kinds of medications from 30 minutes to less than five minutes. It also processed over INR 8 crore during the trial run and, most importantly, reduced costs by 66%.

Clinical Impact Backed by Technology and Research

RISA Labs is tackling a serious problem: approximately 70% of patients with cancer suffer treatment holdups owing to authorization problems. In numerous instances, those hitches can stretch out for a month, with the potential to up the mortality risk 13%. 

Dr. Jeffrey Vacirca, the CEO of New York Cancer and Blood Specialists, put it forthrightly, “Cancer care is time sensitive. Every delay in treatment can affect outcomes. Prior authorizations continue to slow us down. What RISA is building is not just smart technology. It removes barriers so our teams can move faster and stay focused on what matters most: caring for patients.”

With its new funding, RISA Labs intends to broaden the deployment of BOSS to 100 cancer centers across the U.S. over the next two years. But their vision doesn’t stop there. This young company aims to serve all the stakeholders in oncology, from hospitals and pharma firms to platforms that coordinate care, and to make BOSS the intelligent backbone of cancer-care operations.