More hospitals want to bring care into the home, but many are missing the technology to support that shift. Axle Health is building AI that can help.
Before launching Axle Health, CEO Adam Stansell helped launch Uber Eats in the northeastern US, coordinating food-delivery logistics in the new market. He later joined Motive, a logistics software company for trucking fleets.
In 2020, when hospitals were scrambling to enable hospital-at-home care during the pandemic, Stansell, his cofounder Connor Hailey, and some of Stansell’s former Uber colleagues set out to create the same intelligence infrastructure for healthcare that the gig economy had built for itself.
Now, Axle Health has raised a $10 million Series A led by F-Prime Capital, Business Insider has learned exclusively. Y Combinator, Pear VC, and Lightbank also participated in the round.
Axle’s software uses AI to handle some of the hardest problems in home healthcare: scheduling, routing, and patient engagement. Its logistics engine can coordinate care based on clinical eligibility, patient preferences, clinician license levels, and even cost, all in real time. Its customers now include large health systems, independent home health agencies, mobile phlebotomy providers, and high-acuity dispatch services.
Axle Health originally set out to be a home health provider, powered by its proprietary technology. The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort and quickly scaled to operate in all 50 states, growing to a couple of million dollars in revenue, Stansell said. But in 2023, the startup pivoted to focus on building and licensing its technology for other hospital-at-home providers.
“We realized it’s better for us — and better for the industry — if instead of keeping the technology for ourselves, we built tools to empower every home health provider,” Stansell said.
Axle Health announced it had raised $4.4 million in funding in February 2024, which Stansell said included seed funding from 2021 and additional funding Axle raised after the business pivoted. In the past year, Stansell said Axle Health has grown its revenue tenfold.
The home health market is growing fast, accelerated by an aging population, clinician shortages, and rising consumer demand for in-home care. Other startups are racing to meet that demand, including by forging ahead with the tech-enabled services model that Axle shelved, like Sprinter Health, which recently landed a $55 million Series B led by General Catalyst to provide at-home preventive care. Later-stage players, acute-care home health provider DispatchHealth and home care tech company Medically Home, merged in March.
Axle wants to differentiate itself both by plugging its tech into the existing home health ecosystem and by building technology that clinicians actually want to use, said Stansell. Axle’s AI generates logistics plans that clinicians trust, which is an especially difficult bar to clear. And Axle’s team, Stansell said, with its several ex-Uber leads, is a key ingredient in the startup’s secret sauce.
Next up, Axle plans to improve its patient engagement capabilities, including rolling out AI-powered voice call features for patients. It’s also expanding its integrations with electronic medical record systems and forming more direct connections with other companies contributing to home health operations, like medical equipment suppliers and pharmacies.
“You’re not going to have one provider that’s going to solve the whole thing,” Stansell said. “You need an ecosystem.”
