RISA Labs Reduces Prior Authorization Times 10x, Helping Cancer Patients Access Life-Saving Treatment Faster
Palo Alto, April 17, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cancer patients don’t just fight the disease – they fight the system. Today, life-saving treatments are routinely delayed by days or even weeks due to manual, error-prone workflows. To solve this, RISA Labs has raised a $3.5M funding round to help healthcare organizations eliminate one of the most persistent barriers to timely cancer care: prior authorization delays. RISA Labs has already proven that faster care is possible by dramatically reducing manual workflows and administrative burden.
The seed was led by Binny Bansal (Flipkart co-founder) with participation from Oncology Ventures, General Catalyst, z21 Ventures, ODD BIRD VC, and Ashish Gupta. The capital will accelerate deployments in the next 100 cancer centers across the country within the next two years.
RISA founders: Kumar Shivang and Kshitij Jaggi.
“Prior authorizations remain one of the least automated parts of our healthcare system,” said Ben Freeberg, Managing Partner at Oncology Ventures. “In oncology, the stakes are higher. 70% of cancer patients experience delays in care because of prior authorization requirements. In 33% of those cases, the delay is one month—a time window that can increase the risk of death by 13% in certain cancer types. The current system isn’t just inefficient – it’s dangerous.”
RISA’s platform—Business Operating System as a Service (BOSS) – is not another automation bot or AI assistant. It’s a full-stack orchestration engine built for the vertical complexity of healthcare, Instead of relying on humans to push paperwork or brittle bots that break when systems change, BOSS decomposes complex workflows into micro-tasks, then delegates them to a network of intelligent agents—LLMs, digital twins, and reinforcement learners, extending across an institution’s entire software stack. This allows BOSS to create a parallel digital workforce, operating on behalf of teams and alongside them. A 1,000-person institution can function like a 2,000-person one overnight, with digital agents making up half the workforce.
“We’ve had Windows, we’ve had Linux, we’ve had Mac, each OS helped humans extract more from machines. But now, we’re drowning in software. There’s too much of it, and a shortage of skilled labor to operate it. Software that was supposed to get work done has become work itself,” Kshitij Jaggi, co-founder and CEO of RISA Labs adds. “BOSS is an AI OS designed for the post-ChatGPT era : where work is no longer about learning tools, but simply expressing intent.”
At a leading US cancer center, BOSS reduced prior authorization times from 30 minutes to under five. In just a few months, it processed over $1 million in medications, freed up 80 percent of staff time, and cut administrative costs by 66 percent.
“Cancer care is time sensitive. Every delay in treatment can affect outcomes. Prior authorizations continue to slow us down. What RISA is building is not just smart technology. It removes barriers so our teams can move faster and stay focused on what matters most: caring for patients,” said Dr. Jeffrey Vacirca, CEO of New York Cancer and Blood Specialists.
Based in Silicon Valley, RISA is founded by IIT Kanpur alumni and repeat founders, Kshitij Jaggi (CEO) and Kumar Shivang (CTO) who’ve been friends for more than a decade now, who’ve previously built and scaled Urban Health. Their frustration with fragmented, slow, and error-prone healthcare workflows during that journey inspired the duo to take a systems-first approach, leading them to develop a foundational AI operating system that can simulate, understand, and orchestrate entire institutional workflows from end to end.
“BOSS is low-entropy system design to bring flow state in system-2 thinking for LLMs; it aims to maximise AI agents’ usefulness for critical problems like oncology operations,” said Kumar Shivang, co-founder & CTO of RISA. “Its orchestration layer then turns that intelligence into precise, real-time execution with integrations with systems of record like Flatiron Health’s EMR.”
RISA’s founding team first explored these concepts through research, co-authoring ‘Digital Twin Ecosystem in Oncology Clinical Operations’—an early effort to envision smarter, AI-driven cancer care workflows. This foundational work laid the conceptual groundwork that later translated into tangible improvements in real-world oncology operations.
RISA’s platform signals a broader shift in enterprise AI. “As AI agents unbundle the $4.6 trillion services industry, RISA’s BOSS leads the way—proven in oncology and built to scale,” said Binny Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart and lead investor.”
Looking ahead, RISA plans to extend across multiple nodes within the oncology ecosystem, positioning itself as the AI transformation partner for both operational and clinical workflows. This includes enabling coordination and intelligence across providers, life sciences organizations, and other stakeholders throughout the journey of a drug – extending the company’s long term vision to building a unified layer for AI-driven orchestration in oncology.
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Media images can be found here.
About RISA Labs
RISA Labs is a Palo Alto-based oncology AI company behind BOSS, at the heart of which is the dynamic orchestration engine for mission-critical operations. Founded by Kshitij Jaggi and Kumar Shivang, repeat entrepreneurs and IIT Kanpur alumni, RISA’s platform leverages agentic AI, digital twins, and LLMs to deconstruct complex workflows into micro-tasks and execute them with unprecedented efficiency. Starting with oncology prior authorizations.
CONTACT: For further information, please contact the RISA press office: media@risalabs.ai
