Drug discovery is accelerating faster than the system that delivers new medicines can absorb, and biologics, specialty drugs, and physician-administered therapies now account for most U.S. drug spending and nearly all of its access problems. A single specialty prescription can trigger up to 15 steps across insurance approvals, financial assistance, and fulfillment, and physicians and their staff already spend about 13 hours a week on prior authorization alone, according to the American Medical Association. Forus built an AI network for medicine to close that gap, giving every prescription its own AI agent that works like a case manager: it reasons through the patient’s clinical, insurance, and financial situation, then submits forms, places calls, follows up, and escalates. Doctors and patients pay nothing and the platform fits inside the workflows practices already use, so it spreads quickly: providers use Forus to treat patients in 85% of U.S. residential ZIP codes, and one Virginia rheumatology clinic reports approvals in under two days and treatment starts within a week or two. Because Forus sits at the center of how prescriptions move, its network shows biopharma companies where providers get stuck and where patients drop off, and nine of the top 15 global biopharma companies now use that view to design research and launch new medicines.
AlleyWatch sat down with Forus CEO and Founder Sahir Jaggi to learn more about the business, its plan to put the platform in every doctor’s office in the country, the company’s latest funding round that brings the total funding raised to $350M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a $150M Series C led by Bain Capital Ventures, with every existing institutional investor reinvesting. It triples our valuation to $3B, four months after announcing our Series B at $1B in May, and brings total funding to more than $300M.
Tell us about the product or service that Forus offers.
Forus is the AI network for medicine, connecting doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma to bring new science to the patients who need it.
We build the network by giving doctors and patients a free platform that gets people onto the treatments their providers prescribe. Embedded directly in provider workflows, the platform manages everything between a clinical decision and a patient starting treatment, including insurance authorizations, financial assistance, and supply chain coordination.
To do this, Forus gives every prescription its own AI agent. Each agent works like a case manager, reasoning through the patient’s clinical, insurance, and financial circumstances and taking the actions required to move the patient from prescription through treatment.
Today, Forus supports millions of people across all 50 states and is already used by providers to treat patients in 85% of U.S. residential ZIP codes. That scale enables our network to help the companies creating medicines get them to market and to patients faster. Nine of the top 15 global biopharma companies are working with us today, alongside many fast-growing biotechs.
Forus’s vision is to accelerate the entire path from discovery to treatment, so more of the science being discovered actually reaches patients, and faster.
What inspired the start of Forus?
I always wanted to do something important in medicine. I originally assumed I would do it as an inventor and spent years in regenerative medicine labs, but an advisor in college made it clear how long and uncertain the path from a breakthrough in a lab to a real patient could be.
In 2022, I was reading forums full of patients and physicians who had prescriptions they simply could not fill, first for GLP-1s and then, as I looked closer, for complex and specialty medicines generally. At the same time, it became clear that AI had advanced far enough to manage that heterogeneity, and that the right business model was to make the product free to the people who need it and build the business on the network instead.
How is Forus different?
First, Forus is end-to-end. A single specialty prescription can take up to 15 steps across insurance approvals, financial assistance, and fulfillment, and it can take multiple months in the worst cases. Most software picks one step of the process, automates it, and hands the rest back to the clinic. Forus consolidates all of it into one system and the whole path from prescription to treatment.
Second, our agents automate the process rather than just help track it. They reason through each patient’s situation and then submit, call, follow up, and escalate. Some insurers still have no electronic prior authorization, so sometimes that means our AI sends a fax and then places a call to confirm the fax arrived. By abstracting away complexity, Forus gives doctors the confidence to prescribe the right treatments and gives patients the certainty they will receive them.
Third, it is free to providers and patients, and it is embedded in the workflows they already use, making it easy to try and adopt. Products that are expensive for providers only ever reach the largest institutions, and products that require significant changes in workflow typically get used once and forgotten.
What market does Forus target and how big is it?
Our initial focus is high-cost and complex medicines: biologics, specialty drugs, and physician-administered therapies. They account for the majority of U.S. drug spend and nearly all of the access difficulty. We already have double-digit national market share in multiple specialties.
Over time, the market will include every provider, payer, pharmacy, and patient involved in getting a medicine to someone, plus the life sciences companies trying to develop, launch, and understand those medicines.
What’s your business model?
The platform is free for providers and patients. Life sciences companies partner with us to integrate their support programs, understand where access is breaking down, and use the network to develop and launch new therapies more effectively.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
Because Forus is free, adoption is not a budget decision for a medical practice. When budgets tighten, a product that mitigates administrative burden becomes more valued, not less.
What was the funding process like?
We were not looking to raise. We had closed the Series B only months earlier and planned to spend the year putting it to work to help us grow. Bain Capital Ventures, which has backed us since the seed, came to us with an offer to lead based on our momentum, and every existing institutional investor reinvested, so the round came together quickly.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Our challenge has not been in raising capital. It is in converting that capital into the capacity to support our platform expansion to every doctor’s office in the country.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Investors are seeing our significant provider adoption and the impact it’s having on patients and provider paperwork, but it’s also about the durability of the model.
Because the product is free, it spreads quickly, which builds a network of providers and patients that would be very hard for anyone to replicate. And because we manage the entire process, we understand approvals, denials, and real-world performance at a level of detail that did not exist before.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Deepening our AI platform with more capable agents and clinical models to support every drug, condition, and payer.
Expand across all major specialties and care settings, including primary care groups and integrated health systems.
Scaling our team to meet accelerating demand.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Solve a problem people feel deeply. We never had to convince a physician that getting a patient onto an advanced treatment is broken; they live it every week. If you are spending your energy creating demand for the problem, capital will not fix that.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Our goal is to put Forus in every doctor’s office in the country and become how medicine moves from discovery to treatment. In the near term, that means expanding across specialties and care settings while continuing to improve the platform’s impact on patient access.
The larger opportunity is to make developing, launching, and delivering every medicine faster and more predictable. If we do that, companies can pursue more drugs for more diseases, and more of the science being discovered becomes treatment. We want to increase the amount of new medicine reaching society every year by an order of magnitude. We will keep building until science is the only limit to medicine.
What’s your favorite summer destination in and around the city?
Caffe Panna.
