George Favvas doesn't mince words about what he's building. After a decade turning Circle Medical into a virtual care operation with revenues topping $100 million, he's launched a startup that lets artificial intelligence draft your prescriptions, order your bloodwork, and sketch out treatment plans. A human doctor still signs off before anything reaches you, but the initial heavy lifting? That's happening in software.
Clara—the San Francisco company Favvas co-founded with two Circle Medical veterans—announced a $12 million pre-seed funding round in May. The pitch is straightforward, maybe deceptively so: continuous primary care for somewhere between $25 and $150 a month, delivered entirely through an AI system that pulls medical records from more than 150,000 provider sources. On pricier tiers, it'll also ingest data from your Oura ring or Apple Watch. The company says it's licensed in all 50 states through affiliated professional corporations, though independent verification of this claim through state licensure registries isn't readily available—a detail that matters given how contentious telehealth regulation remains.
What makes Clara notable isn't just the technology. It's the pedigree and the playbook Favvas is essentially rerunning—except this time, the economics hinge on whether an algorithm can handle the work that once required hundreds of clinicians.
What You're Actually Getting
Clara sits in ambiguous territory, somewhere between a glorified symptom checker and an actual telehealth visit. You chat with the AI. It knows your medical history. It asks follow-ups. Then it generates clinical recommendations: a prescription refill, say, or a lab order to check thyroid function. A licensed physician reviews that output before you see it.
The membership model comes in three flavors. Basic, at $25 monthly, gives you unlimited AI conversations, plus physician-reviewed prescriptions and lab orders. Standard doubles the price to $50 and adds wearable integration along with a 74-biomarker panel. Concierge members—paying $150 a month—get an expanded lab workup. The company lists either 107 or 108 tests depending on which page you land on (the pricing page shows 107, while the AI primary care and longevity pages list 108), a minor inconsistency that suggests the product is still firming up. Those panels include markers like ApoB and Lp(a), the sort of cardiovascular risk factors longevity enthusiasts obsess over but that most traditional practices don't routinely measure.
All plans are HSA and FSA eligible. Clara handles acute issues, chronic disease management, preventive care, mental health screening. What it won't do: prescribe controlled substances. That's spelled out in the terms of use, dated mid-April.
Rebuilding the Team
Favvas left his CEO post at Circle Medical roughly six months before announcing Clara, according to a LinkedIn update that also disclosed Circle had hit a $114 million revenue run rate while serving 400,000 patients across 425 providers in over 30 states. Big numbers for a company most people outside digital health circles haven't heard of.
He brought two key lieutenants with him. Caitlin Swift, Circle's former VP of Clinical Operations, now runs clinical strategy as Chief Clinical Officer. She'd overseen quality and compliance as Circle scaled to around a million telehealth encounters annually—experience that presumably taught her where the operational landmines are buried. Dr. Brendan Levy signed on as CMO. Levy founded HeyDoctor, a Y Combinator telehealth startup later acquired by GoodRx, then stayed on as Chief Medical Officer through the GoodRx Care IPO. He's seen the full arc, from scrappy launch to public company scrutiny.
The team also pulled in Claudia Tucker, Teladoc's former SVP of Government Affairs, who led state telehealth licensure waivers during the pandemic. That hire signals Clara knows regulatory navigation will matter as much as the technology itself.
By early June, the company's public team page listed 10 people. Engineers from Discord, Reddit, Brex. Clinical staff from Circle Medical and other digital health outfits. Small but experienced, the kind of team that's been through the chaos before.
The Money and the Mission
Y Combinator and A.Capital co-led the $12 million round. Not a massive sum by current venture standards, though calling it "pre-seed" funding feels like semantic gymnastics—this is effectively a seed round with founders who've already built a nine-figure business. Liquid 2 Ventures, backed by Joe Montana, joined the table alongside SV Angel and a roster of angel investors: Tim Abbott, Immad Akhund, Vinny Lingham, Kevin Hartz.
The stated mission borders on grandiose: "Adding 1 billion years of healthy lifespan to humanity." That framing positions Clara as more than a primary care replacement. It's a longevity play, leaning into preventive biomarker tracking that most traditional practices either can't or won't offer at scale.
Whether that's vision or hype depends largely on execution.
The Crowded Space
Clara isn't alone in this territory. Lotus Health raised $35 million earlier in the year for a similar model offering free consultations, backed by 50-state licensure and multilingual capabilities. K Health and One Medical occupy adjacent lanes, though their business models diverge—K Health charges per visit or via monthly plans; One Medical operates as a membership hybrid with brick-and-mortar locations still in the mix.
The regulatory landscape remains murky. Clara's privacy policy, effective mid-April, discloses that it uses third-party AI technologies from providers like Anthropic, which may access personal health information to power the platform. The company displays HIPAA compliance badges and American Telemedicine Association membership on its site, though those certifications tell you more about paperwork than actual practice quality.
What Clara is really betting on is this: that the Circle Medical playbook—high-touch clinical operations, multi-state licensure infrastructure, direct-to-consumer membership—can work at a fundamentally lower cost when AI handles the initial triage and drafting.
Maybe it can. The Circle team proved they could scale virtual care profitably, which is more than most digital health startups manage. But that model still required hundreds of providers on payroll. This one requires patients to trust that software can understand their symptoms well enough to draft a treatment plan, even if a human eventually rubber-stamps it.
How patients and regulators respond to that proposition—your first conversation is with an algorithm, your final approval from a doctor you've likely never met—will determine whether Clara represents the future of primary care or just another well-funded experiment in automation. Favvas has done this before, which counts for something. Whether it counts for enough is the question.
