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April 17, 2025 – Palo Alto, CA
Cancer patients don’t just fight the disease - they fight the system. Today, life-saving treatments are routinely delayed by days or even weeks due to manual, error-prone workflows. At RISA Labs, we’re here to fix that
We’re thrilled to announce a $3.5 million seed round to help healthcare organizations eliminate one of the most persistent barriers to timely cancer care: prior authorization delays. Our platform has already proven that faster care is possible by dramatically reducing manual effort and saving clinician time.
The seed was led by Binny Bansal (Flipkart co-founder) with participation from Oncology Ventures, General Catalyst, z21 Ventures, ODD BIRD VC, and Ashish Gupta. The capital will accelerate deployments in the next 100 cancer centers across the country within the next two years.
“Prior authorizations remain one of the least automated parts of our healthcare system,” said Ben Freeberg, Managing Partner at Oncology Ventures. “In oncology, the stakes are higher. 70% of cancer patients experience delays in care because of prior authorization requirements. In 33% of those cases, the delay is one month—a time window that can increase the risk of death by 13% in certain cancer types. The current system isn’t just inefficient – it’s dangerous.”
RISA’s platform - Business Operating System as a Service (BOSS) - is not another automation bot or AI assistant. It’s a full-stack orchestration engine built for the vertical complexity of healthcare. Instead of relying on humans to push paperwork or brittle bots that break when systems change, BOSS decomposes complex workflows into micro-tasks, then delegates them to a network of intelligent agents: LLMs, digital twins, and reinforcement learners, extending across an institution’s entire software stack. This allows BOSS to create a parallel digital workforce, operating on behalf of teams and alongside them. A 1,000-person institution can function like a 2,000-person one overnight, with digital agents making up half the workforce.
“We’ve had Windows, we’ve had Linux, we’ve had Mac, each OS helped humans extract more from machines. But now, we’re drowning in software. There’s too much of it, and a shortage of skilled labor to operate it. Software that was supposed to get work done has become work itself,” Kshitij Jaggi, co-founder and CEO of RISA Labs adds. “BOSS is an AI OS designed for the post-ChatGPT era: where work is no longer about learning tools, but simply expressing intent.”
At a leading US cancer center, BOSS has reduced prior authorization times from 30 minutes to under five. In just a few months, it processed over $1 million in medications, freed up 80 percent of staff time, and cut administrative costs by 66 percent.
“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,” said Dr. Jeffrey Vacirca, CEO of New York Cancer and Blood Specialists.
Founded by Kshitij Jaggi and Kumar Shivang, repeat founders and IIT Kanpur alumni, RISA is the product of a decade-long friendship and a shared frustration with slow, fragmented healthcare workflows. It inspired the duo to take a systems-first approach, leading them to develop a foundational AI operating system that can simulate, understand, and orchestrate entire institutional workflows from end to end.
“BOSS is low-entropy system design to bring flow state in system-2 thinking for LLMs; it aims to maximise AI agents' usefulness for critical problems like oncology operations,” said Kumar Shivang, co-founder & CTO of RISA. “Its orchestration layer then turns that intelligence into precise, real-time execution with integrations with systems of record like Flatiron Health’s EMR.”
Before launching RISA, our founding team first explored these concepts through research, co-authoring 'Digital Twin Ecosystem in Oncology Clinical Operations' - an early effort to envision smarter, AI-driven cancer care workflows. At RISA, we start with systems-level abstraction—simulating complexity through digital twins and agentic AI—and translate it into a pipeline that delivers real-world results.This foundational work laid the conceptual groundwork that later translated into tangible improvements in real-world oncology operations.
RISA’s platform signals a broader shift in enterprise AI. “As AI agents unbundle the $4.6 trillion services industry, RISA’s BOSS leads the way—proven in oncology and built to scale,” said Binny Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart and lead investor.”
Looking ahead, we plan to extend across multiple nodes within the oncology ecosystem, positioning ourselves as the AI transformation partner for both operational and clinical workflows. This includes enabling coordination and intelligence across providers, life sciences organizations, and other stakeholders throughout the journey of a drug - extending the company’s long term vision to building a unified layer for AI-driven orchestration in oncology.
