Corridor raises $25M seed to build a health benefits brokerage for SMBs

It’s been a while since Jackson Wagner left his job as a product lead at Scale AI in July 2022. Now, he’s building in a new space altogether: The new effort is an AI health benefits brokerage called Corridor that focuses on small businesses, which it says traditional brokerages often overlook because small accounts generate lower commissions even though they take the same amount of time as larger accounts.

Corridor is betting an AI solution may help on that front. On its platform, customers work with human advisors while AI agents do administrative tasks in the background. The company says its agents can handle tedious office work like checking whether a doctor is in a customer’s insurance network, scheduling care, or providing a doctor updated health insurance information.

“We are every single employee and management’s concierge for all things healthcare,” Nikhil Aggarwal, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch.

On Monday, Corridor said it had raised a $25 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures.

Corridor came about after Wagner was in a running accident, and the poor handling of his care led him down a path of “significant, consistent, chronic pain.”

“I developed a long list of complications that needed to be worked through one by one,” he said.

He eventually left Scale AI to get a master’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, before joining Build Robotics in 2023. Later, he teamed up with former Scale AI colleague Eric Qian to work on Capernaum AI, a startup building a clinical agent targeting musculoskeletal care and chronic pain.

The two eventually approached Cold Start to see if they would fund Capernaum, but Aggarwal, who was a partner at Cold Start along with Jason Dong, saw a much larger opportunity. So the four of them took off and launched Corridor together.

“Since health plans are the window through which the vast majority of Americans access healthcare, it became overwhelmingly clear that one of the highest impact things I could do to improve outcomes for individuals was to create a way for them to access better health plans,” Wagner said.

Other companies in this space include Ignition Benefits and Nava Benefits.

Investors in Corridor’s round include BoxGroup, as well as executives from OpenAI, Scale AI, and Ramp. The startup is now preparing for Q4, since “80% of small businesses choose their health plan in Q4,” Aggarwal said.

“Our vision is to build the most trusted healthcare institution in America,” he said. “To earn that, we are laser-focused on a simple promise: doing what we say we’re going to do for the businesses and employees we serve.”