A San Francisco startup promising to bring order to one of healthcare's most chaotic cost centers just secured the backing it needs to prove the concept works at scale. Onos Health announced on August 26, 2026, that it raised $17 million in a Series A led by Costanoa, with Flare Capital Partners and CVS Health Ventures joining the round.
The financing brings total capital raised to $23.3 million for the company, which builds what it calls a behavioral health clinical intelligence platform for insurers. Onos previously closed a $6.3 million seed round co-led by Haystack and Pathlight Ventures, with participation from Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments and Nebular, the company said in its announcement. The startup now counts Aetna and Kaiser Permanente among its customers.
At its core, Onos ingests the messy reality of behavioral health care — claims data, utilization records, handwritten session notes, treatment plans, clinical assessments — and attempts to structure it against payer guidelines. The platform then packages that intelligence into modules health plans can deploy for quality measurement, utilization management, fraud detection, and provider network oversight. Its focus areas span substance use disorder treatment, applied behavior analysis, and mental health services.
The company positions itself carefully on the automation spectrum. Onos maintains HIPAA compliance and SOC 2 Type 2 certification, but more importantly operates on what it describes as a "clinician-in-the-loop" model. The AI generates recommendations; humans make final decisions. That design choice reflects both regulatory reality and the stakes involved when algorithms touch mental health treatment.
Onos claims its platform delivered a 35% improvement in clinical standard adherence and 75% better efficiency in clinical reviews for its customers. Perhaps more compelling to plan executives: the company says it cut behavioral program costs by more than 6% within twelve months. One mid-sized regional plan saw $10.8 million in clinical cost savings, Onos reported. The figures have not been independently verified.
The startup says it works with three of the six largest U.S. health plans, though it declined to share headcount or valuation details. Flare Capital Partners publicly named Aetna and Kaiser Permanente as customers in a recent post about the investment.
That customer traction matters in a market defined by scale and complexity. U.S. spending on mental health and substance use disorder treatment reached $139.6 billion in 2021, based on analysis from RTI International and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The National Institute of Mental Health found that 23.1% of American adults experienced some form of mental illness in 2022. Yet for all that volume, behavioral health remains what investors politely call "one of the least understood categories in healthcare."
"It represents billions of dollars in spend and enormous variation in care costs with low correlation to care quality," said Amy Cheetham, a partner at Costanoa, in the company's announcement. That's venture capital speak for: the system is broken and someone will pay to fix it.
Alyssa Reisner, vice president and general partner at CVS Health Ventures, said Onos "helps surface actionable clinical insights from data that has historically been difficult to interpret." CVS Health, of course, owns Aetna, making its venture arm both investor and indirect customer.
The founding team brings a mix of consulting, health tech, and machine learning credentials. CEO Akshay Agrawal previously worked at Bain & Company and Bain Capital before holding executive roles at mPulse and Presence. Co-founder Josh Levitan spent fifteen years building technology for health plans and Medicaid programs, including Hawaii Med-QUEST and Wisconsin BadgerCare. CTO Suhaas Prasad co-founded and served as CTO at Aspire, and holds a master's in computer science from Stanford with a focus on machine learning.
Onos enters a competitive but still-forming market. NeuroFlow, Lucet, and Carelon Behavioral Health all operate in behavioral health analytics and management for insurers. Broader players in payer-facing clinical intelligence and utilization management include Cohere Health and Innovaccer, among others.
The company said the new capital will accelerate adoption with health plans, improve outcomes and affordability, and expand platform capabilities. Hiring targets were not disclosed, though expansion seems inevitable given the customer pipeline and product roadmap ahead.
For now, Onos appears to be threading a familiar startup needle: building software sophisticated enough to handle healthcare's complexity, while keeping humans involved enough to satisfy regulators and clinicians. Whether that balance holds as the company scales will determine if it joins the rare group of health tech companies that survive contact with the American insurance system.
