Basalt Health has successfully raised $20 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by investor New Enterprise Associates, bringing the company's total raised capital to approximately $24.5 million. Approximately 14 million patients annually require post-acute care.
Despite this need, the process of placing patients remains heavily reliant on manual operations within hospitals and care facilities. Case managers often send extensive clinical packages to various institutions and must wait for responses to find a suitable placement for the patient.
Basalt aims to streamline this process using artificial intelligence technology. The platform can read referrals received via fax, portals, or direct integration with electronic health records. Basalt then analyzes each referral against the specific clinical criteria of each facility and supports workflows covering intake, benefits verification, and pre-authorizations.
The technology helps care teams make placement decisions faster and provides justifications that support consistent and defensible choices. The company notes that delays and mismatches in placement contribute significantly to overall healthcare costs.
Basalt's technology is designed to eliminate administrative hurdles that can delay patient stays in hospital beds. Basalt's founder and CEO, Ben Hackett, emphasized that the problem is personal, as his mother and grandmother worked as nurses, giving him early exposure to the healthcare field.
Hackett later spent nearly a decade at Accolade. He noted that administrative requirements increasingly distract clinicians from direct patient care. In 2024, he founded Basalt to solve this issue, focusing on technologies that align with existing clinical workflows.
The new capital comes at a time when healthcare providers are continuously seeking ways to manage administrative burdens. The post-acute placement process involves hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, rehabilitation centers, insurance companies, patients, and their families. Since each party may require different information before a transfer occurs, Basalt's approach consolidates these steps into a single workflow. Instead of forcing staff to review documents repeatedly and manually contact facilities, the platform helps organize referral information and identify placement options.
Basalt has been collaborating with Lifepoint Health since its seed funding in 2025. Through this integration, the median time to process charts has been reduced from 8.5 minutes to 1.2 minutes. Lifepoint plans to implement Basalt in 49 additional regions by the end of 2026. Furthermore, the company is scaling to 62 ScionHealth hospitals by the end of 2026, a network comprising over 6,000 specialists. ScionHealth reported that Basalt helped its teams work faster and make more informed decisions.
The adoption of Basalt's technology reflects the demand for AI that functions within existing healthcare systems. The technology processes real clinical documents rather than relying on separate chatbot interfaces. The Series A funds will be used to expand functionality beyond patient intake.
The funding will also be used to hire personnel across various business functions, including sales, marketing, implementation, and engineering. NEA partner Blake Wu stated that Basalt combines clinical impact with operational value, noting the company's adoption by major healthcare systems. Merrill Anovic, General Partner at 25madison, noted that Basalt integrates AI into current workflows, allowing case managers to receive placement recommendations without using a separate chatbot. The company's expansion into payer relations could link clinical and financial processes. Automating benefit verification and authorization requirements can help reduce delays while maintaining human team involvement. Thus, Basalt's technology can help solve administrative problems in post-acute care.