Jon Wang and Jeff Liu met dozens of prospective cofounders—until they met each other.
Wang had left medical school years earlier to pursue a startup career, while Liu was a former Facebook engineer. They were looking to begin their lives anew as founders of their own startup, and lived more than 2,500 miles apart, with Liu in San Francisco and Wang in New York.
They started to think they could be a match, looking at First Round Capital’s “cofounder dating” questionnaire. Questions include everything from: “Can one cofounder fire another cofounder? Can someone else fire a founder?” to “How do you cope with stress?”
“Jon and I were both ‘cofounder dating’ at this point, and had tried working with several people,” said Liu. “I do think it’s similar to dating in real life, where you kind of just know and it doesn’t take that long to realize ‘this can work.’”
Wang and Liu decided to lock it in, fusing their experiences in AI and medicine. In 2023, they cofounded Assort Health, a startup building voice AI agents for healthcare. Two years later, the company has made the Series A leap: Assort Health has raised a $22 million Series A, led by First Round Capital and Chemistry, with participation from Quiet Capital. This brings Assort’s total capital raised to $26 million. The company, which says it manages millions of calls annually, is looking to answer the question: What if patient scheduling phone trees weren't terrible?
Kemuel Carey, CEO of Peninsula Orthopaedic Associates, said that before his Salisbury, Md.-based office brought on Assort, patients who called in could be waiting on hold for 30 minutes or longer.
“Or worse, they’d just show up in person to schedule because they couldn’t get through,” Carey said via email. “With Assort, the difference has been night and day. Hold times are down to about a minute. Scheduling accuracy is up significantly…We even ran a blind survey recently, and our patients gave the AI agent a 4+ out of 5 star rating—a surprise, as we expected significant resistance to the technology in our region.”
Assort is among a growing wave of AI startups operating in healthcare that seem to be gaining traction. It’s a complex area (Liu said that privacy and HIPAA are “table stakes” for Assort). But the success of companies like Abridge suggest that there’s room for innovation in healthcare right now, even at a tense time for the system overall. Assort is not disclosing revenue, but told Fortune it has seen revenue grow by 8x since Q4 2024.
"It’s early for this company,” said Bill Trenchard, partner at First Round. “They're one of the fastest-growing companies we've ever had, including Uber or Roblox. It’s such a pain point for clinics and it shows how well they’re adopting the solution so quickly."
For Kristina Shen, managing partner and cofounder at Chemistry, Assort marks a milestone—her first (and Chemistry’s first announced) investment since she left Andreessen Horowitz to join up with Bessemer’s Ethan Kurzweil and Index’s Mark Goldberg. The three started the buzzy new firm last year, and Shen sees the Assort investment as a critical statement about the new firm’s ethos. Though she, Kurzweil, and Goldberg have recently been wondering if they’ve been too picky, Assort was unanimous.
“I've been investing now for 12 years,” said Shen. “But starting a new firm, it sets high expectations and such a high bar for your first deal. I’m choosing the world where I’m going to be an incredible investor and Chemistry is going to be successful. So though the bar was high for me, you know how people talk about vibe coding? I think there’s also vibe investing. You know when it feels right.”
Sometimes, when you know, you know. It’s not lost on Liu and Wang that First Round—which made the questionnaire that they used to find each other—is now an investor. And as they funnel the proceeds from this Series A into hiring efforts, that questionnaire still has a place at Assort.
"Every single employee at our company now fills out this exact same questionnaire,” said Wang. “This early, you’re basically a cofounder. You’re part of the founding team on this critical mission, and we only want to hire people who believe in that."
ICYMI…Figma has confidentially filed its S-1 despite Wall Street turbulence. Elsewhere, Founders Fund reportedly has raised a $4.6 billion fund, while OpenAI reportedly is looking at building its own social network.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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