Otter Health, a Washington, DC-based healthcare technology startup, has raised $8 million in seed funding co-led by Fika Ventures and Evidenced. The round also included participation from Slow Ventures, Metrodora, CoFound Partners, Layout Ventures, Patient Capital, and Semper Virens.
The company announced the funding on October 15, 2026, alongside its official launch. Otter Health is developing an AI-powered clinical intelligence platform designed to help healthcare payers and providers manage care quality, clinical decisions, and healthcare spending while reducing reliance on traditional prior authorization processes.
Otter Health was founded by healthcare professionals and technology executives Amol Navathe, Keith Florance, Ram Keralapura, and Will Bartlett. Florance serves as co-founder and CEO, Keralapura as co-founder and CTO, and Bartlett as co-founder and Chief Product Officer. Navathe, a physician and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is also a founder.
The founding team brings experience in healthcare delivery, clinical policy, payer-provider relationships, and technology development. Before Otter Health, Florance led the payer business at Clarify Health and previously helped build Embedded Healthcare, which was acquired by Clarify Health in 2022.
Otter Health’s platform operates independently of specific electronic health record (EHR) systems and evaluates clinical decisions against evidence-based guidelines in real time. It covers areas such as specialist referrals, outpatient procedures, treatment pathway adherence, and care transitions.
The platform provides healthcare organizations with visibility into clinical practice patterns, comparisons between providers, and information to support targeted clinician engagement. Its approach is intended to help payers and providers identify potentially unnecessary care and manage clinical variation without relying exclusively on authorization requirements.
Otter Health is already working with healthcare organizations across the payer and provider ecosystem. According to the company, early implementations have enabled participating organizations to remove certain prior authorization requirements while maintaining clinical decision-making aligned with evidence-based standards.
The seed financing supports Otter Health’s development of its clinical intelligence platform and its efforts to expand the use of evidence-based utilization management across healthcare organizations.
