The pitch sounds almost too obvious: Before hospitals and insurers pour millions into artificial intelligence, shouldn't someone figure out if it's worth it?
That's the wager Andy Fanning and Michael Hollis are making with Optura, their Nashville-based startup that just closed a $17.5 million Series A round led by Salesforce Ventures. Announced May 14, 2026, the funding—which brings total capital raised past $25 million—reflects a bet that healthcare's AI gold rush has a measurement problem.
And perhaps more urgently, a trust problem.
The company has built what it calls a "return on AI investment" platform, complete with a trademarked ROAI metric that tracks projects from initial evaluation through deployment. Echo Health Ventures joined Salesforce as a co-lead, while Susa Ventures, Matrix Partners, and HC9 Ventures—all previous backers—doubled down.
When 95% of AI Pilots Go Nowhere
The timing appears strategic. A widely cited MIT study from mid-2025 found that roughly 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots fail to deliver any measurable impact on the bottom line. Fortune and others covered the findings in August, and the statistic has become something of a rallying cry for AI skeptics—particularly in healthcare, where cost pressures and regulatory scrutiny make expensive experiments harder to justify.
U.S. health spending hit 18.0% of GDP in 2024, up from 17.7% the year prior, according to data the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released early this year. CMS projects that share could climb to 20.3% within a decade. Against that backdrop, CFOs want proof, not promises.
Fanning, who served as VP of AI and automation at Cigna before co-founding Optura, saw the disconnect firsthand. Hollis, formerly president and chief growth officer at health tech firm Emids, watched organizations chase pilot after pilot without clear ways to track whether the technology moved the needle. Together, they launched Optura in 2025.
Since then, the platform claims to have ingested more than $2 billion in AI initiatives across 250-plus use cases, tracking what the company says amounts to $120 million in realized value. The firm reports a 700% ROAI on active projects—a figure that, if accurate, would make a strong case for the platform's premise.
The Echo Advantage
Echo Health Ventures isn't your typical investor. The firm backs companies on behalf of several Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, and its portfolio startups often land commercial deals with members of the Echo Innovation Alliance—a network that already includes Optura customers like Independence Blue Cross, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, and Capital Blue Cross.
That dynamic gives Optura unusual access. Strategic capital that comes with built-in distribution is rare; in healthcare, where sales cycles can stretch for years and pilot fatigue runs high, it's a meaningful edge.
Salesforce Ventures, meanwhile, has been hunting for enterprise AI plays with staying power. Katie Thiry, speaking for the firm in Optura's announcement, framed the investment around "rigor and visibility"—code, in venture speak, for making AI spending defensible to boards and regulators.
The company previously raised $6.5 million in seed funding announced in May 2025, co-led by Susa and Matrix. HC9 Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on health services, came in later that year.
What the Platform Actually Does
Strip away the jargon, and Optura's system does a few specific things. It pulls in operational data from a hospital or insurer's existing workflows, then evaluates and prioritizes AI use cases based on expected return. The platform can generate AI agents from those workflows, simulate outcomes before anything goes live, and track performance through real-time dashboards once projects launch.
Customers—Ardent Health and Prime Therapeutics round out the list alongside the Blue plans—get what amounts to a scoreboard for AI spending. The idea is to shift conversations from "Are we doing AI?" to "Is our AI making money?"
Whether that's enough to justify the platform's own cost remains an open question. Optura declined to disclose pricing, though health systems and insurers in this market typically pay six or seven figures annually for enterprise software.
What Comes Next
The Series A capital will fund expansion in a few directions. Optura plans to deepen its AI capabilities, grow platform engineering teams, and forge partnerships with large language model providers—the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world whose tools power much of the generative AI healthcare organizations are experimenting with.
In April, the company launched what it's calling a Value Creation division, hiring Jon Hilton as SVP of AI Value Creation and Katy Feldner as VP of AI Transformation & Value Creation. The unit's role, in theory, is to help customers squeeze more return from the platform itself—a kind of meta-optimization play.
Michael R. Vennera, an executive at Independence Blue Cross, emphasized "measurable outcomes" in the funding announcement. Kurt Sheline of Echo Health Ventures used words like "accountability" and "orchestrated systems"—the sort of language that signals investors want discipline, not experimentation for its own sake.
The broader question is whether Optura can scale beyond early adopters. Proving ROI on AI is valuable if organizations actually care about proof. But healthcare has a long history of buying technology for reasons that have little to do with demonstrated returns: competitive pressure, regulatory mandates, executive enthusiasm.
If the industry truly demands measurement before deployment, Optura has a clear lane. If not, well—the company might find itself measuring the ROI of measuring ROI.
