Latitude Health Announces Funding from Activate Venture Partners and Winter Street Ventures to Accelerate AI-Native Utilization Management Platform
Investment will accelerate product innovation and customer growth as Latitude Health works to transform utilization management, combining AI-powered automation with clinical expertise to streamline coverage determinations, help patients access appropriate care more efficiently, and reduce administrative barriers.
San Francisco, CA, September 9th, 2026 – Latitude Health, an AI-native healthcare technology company modernizing utilization management (UM) for health plans, today announced the successful completion of a multi-million-dollar financing round led by Activate Venture Partners and Winter Street Ventures. The investment will support continued product innovation, expansion of Latitude’s customer base, and the company’s mission to make utilization management faster, more efficient, and less burdensome for health plans, providers, and the patients they serve.
Utilization management plays an important role in determining whether healthcare services meet a health plan’s coverage policies, clinical criteria, and escalation pathways. But the processes surrounding those determinations create significant administrative work for both health plans and providers, frequently delaying patients’ access to covered care.
Latitude has built an end-to-end AI-native platform designed specifically to modernize that process within health plans, spanning authorization intake, triage, clinical review, and the operational workflows surrounding coverage determinations. Across the workflow, Latitude uses AI to automate administrative tasks, surface relevant clinical and policy information, and help utilization management teams make faster, more consistent, and better-informed determinations.
By reducing administrative friction within utilization management, Latitude also aims to improve the experience on the other side of the process: enabling physicians and their teams to spend less time navigating authorization requirements and more time caring for patients, while helping patients receive timely access to care covered under their health benefits.
The platform is already delivering significant automation and measurable operational impact. Latitude can automate more than 85% of the authorization intake workflow, intelligently routing cases that require additional information or human review, while customers have seen up to a 67% reduction in the resources required to process an authorization end-to-end.
“Prior authorization has become one of the most prominent and contentious sources of friction in healthcare, and as a physician, I’ve seen firsthand how administrative complexity can consume clinicians’ time and create unnecessary barriers between patients and the care their physicians prescribe,” said Jarred Bressner, MD of Activate Venture Partners. “What is compelling about Latitude is the opportunity to address this problem in a way that doesn’t simply shift the burden from one part of the healthcare system to another. By making the process faster, more transparent, and less administratively intensive, we have the rare opportunity to create a true triple win: patients can get more timely access to covered care, physicians and providers can spend less time navigating administrative hurdles and more time caring for patients, and payers can administer benefits more efficiently and consistently. That is the kind of technology-enabled change that can make the healthcare system work better for everyone.”
“My mom was a utilization management nurse, so I grew up with an appreciation for the people doing this incredibly important and complex work every day,” said Chuck Feerick, CEO of Latitude Health. “We built Latitude to give those teams better tools to evaluate care against coverage policies and clinical criteria, automate the administrative work surrounding those determinations, and focus their expertise on the cases where human judgment matters most. When the process works better, plans and providers spend less time navigating administrative hurdles and patients can get answers and access to covered care faster.”
Bringing Intelligence and Automation Across the UM Workflow
Unlike point solutions that automate individual tasks or a single step in the prior authorization process, Latitude brings AI-powered efficiency across the broader utilization management operation. Rather than requiring organizations to redesign their operating model around the technology, Latitude works within existing UM operations to increase the capacity of the teams doing the work while preserving clinical oversight, organizational control, and critical policy and workflow knowledge.
That matters because health plans and the organizations that support their utilization management functions have spent years building clinical expertise, policy knowledge, operational processes, and provider relationships. Latitude enables them to retain and build on that institutional knowledge while using AI to fundamentally improve the speed, capacity, and economics of the underlying operation.
Latitude also works alongside customers’ existing technology rather than requiring a costly and disruptive rip-and-replace approach or forcing teams to operate across disconnected systems. Through integrations with existing healthcare infrastructure, organizations can introduce AI into established workflows, modernize UM operations incrementally, and begin realizing value more quickly.
Latitude’s formal partnership with HealthEdge, a leading healthcare technology company serving health plans, reflects this integration-first approach. Through the partnership, Latitude’s AI-powered utilization management capabilities can work alongside existing HealthEdge technology, giving payer organizations a path to modernize UM workflows while building on their existing technology investments.
Because Latitude operates across the UM workflow, the platform also creates a broader intelligence layer for clinical and operational leadership. Advanced analytics and actionable insights provide greater visibility into utilization trends, workflow performance, resource allocation, and opportunities for improvement. By turning UM data into actionable intelligence, Latitude enables leaders to identify operational bottlenecks, improve performance, better understand patterns in authorization requests and coverage determinations, and continually refine how their organizations manage utilization. The result is faster, more consistent determinations, less administrative friction for the physicians ordering care, and faster access to care for patients who need it.
The platform is built alongside UM clinicians and for UM clinicians, combining AI-powered automation with human expertise. Rather than replacing clinical professionals or making treatment decisions, Latitude automates and streamlines the administrative and analytical work surrounding utilization management decisions—from surfacing relevant clinical information and coverage criteria to identifying cases that require additional information or human review—so clinicians can focus their time and expertise where judgment matters most.
Latitude currently serves customers across Medicare, Medicaid, and Commercial health plans, as well as third-party administrators (TPAs) and UM-as-a-Service organizations. The company’s growing market presence demonstrates demand for technology that can reduce the administrative burden associated with utilization management while maintaining the expertise and oversight required for complex coverage determinations.
Investment to Accelerate Growth
The new funding from Activate Venture Partners and Winter Street Ventures will enable Latitude to accelerate development of its AI-native platform, expand its advanced analytics and clinical intelligence capabilities, strengthen integrations and strategic partnerships, and support continued customer growth.
“Latitude is solving a significant and costly problem for healthcare organizations with technology that delivers measurable value today while creating an important foundation for how utilization management will operate in the future,” said Chris Palmieri, Managing Partner at Winter Street Ventures. “We were particularly impressed by the team’s deep hands-on operating experience and understanding of UM, its customer traction, and its ability to combine AI automation with clinical expertise.”
As healthcare organizations face continued pressure to control costs, improve quality, reduce administrative burden, and deliver better experiences for members and providers, utilization management represents one of the most significant opportunities for responsible AI-enabled transformation.
“This investment allows us to move faster, but our focus remains the same,” added Feerick. “We want to give utilization management teams technology that makes their jobs easier and gives leaders better visibility into what is happening across their organizations – so the whole system moves faster for the people it’s meant to serve.”
About Latitude Health
Latitude Health is an AI-native healthcare technology company transforming utilization management. Its end-to-end platform combines intelligent automation, clinical workflows, and advanced analytics to help healthcare organizations reduce administrative burden, improve operational performance, and make faster, more consistent, and better-informed coverage and authorization determinations.
Built alongside utilization management clinicians and designed to integrate with existing healthcare technology infrastructure, Latitude enables health plans, TPAs, and other healthcare organizations to modernize UM while reducing administrative friction for providers and helping patients receive more timely access to covered care.
For more information, visit www.latitudehealth.com
About Activate Venture Partners
Activate Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm with four decades of experience identifying, aligning, and partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs to build companies in healthcare and other critical industries. The firm leads early-stage investment rounds, partnering closely with founders and taking meaningful ownership positions in companies it believes have the potential to become market leaders. Activate's partners and affiliated funds have invested in over 100 companies, producing numerous IPOs and dozens of exits to strategic and financial buyers, and more than $10 billion in enterprise value across the portfolio. The firm combines deep domain expertise, investment judgment, operating perspective, and an extensive industry network to help entrepreneurs tackle some of healthcare's most important and complex challenges and build category-defining, enduring businesses.
About Winter Street Ventures
Winter Street Ventures (WSV) is a venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled healthcare and AI-driven companies that are reengineering how care is delivered, financed, and experienced. Winter Street Ventures has a proven history of scaling transformative healthcare companies. Founded and relaunched as an independent fund by Chris Palmieri, a seasoned operator who has successfully guided multiple billion-dollar organizations through growth, turnarounds, and acquisitions, WSV is uniquely positioned at the intersection of healthcare delivery, technology, and public policy.
Media Contact:
Megan Petroni
megan.petroni@latitudehealth.com
