Jeremy Gurewitz remembers the maze. His mother's pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2020 brought not just grief but an impossible logistics puzzle: insurance claims that went nowhere, specialist appointments scheduled months apart, prior authorizations that required hours on hold. Someone had to quarterback it all, and that someone was usually him or another family member, unpaid and unequipped.
Now Gurewitz has built a $1 billion business around solving that problem—or rather, around getting Medicare to pay for solving it.
Solace Health, the Redwood City startup he founded barely two years ago, announced Tuesday it had raised $130 million in Series C funding led by IVP, vaulting the company into unicorn territory at a valuation north of $1 billion. Menlo Ventures, SignalFire, Torch Capital, Inspired Capital, and RiverPark Ventures joined the round.
The February 10 deal caps a blistering run for a company whose entire business model depends on a regulatory shift that's younger than the iPhone 16. Last January, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began reimbursing for something called "community health integration" and "principal illness navigation"—bureaucratic labels for what amounts to having someone hold your hand through the healthcare system.
Those new billing codes, known as G-codes in industry parlance, opened the floodgates. Suddenly patient navigators and community health workers could bill Medicare directly for monthly care coordination, provided they worked under physician supervision. For Solace, it was starter pistol and tailwind combined.
The Advocacy Assembly Line
The company's model is straightforward, even if the healthcare landscape it navigates isn't. Solace matches patients—often older adults with chronic conditions or serious diagnoses—with dedicated advocates drawn from a network that now exceeds 2,000 physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and social workers spread across all 50 states. These advocates coordinate care, untangle insurance benefits, chase down prior authorizations, and join appointments virtually. They handle the administrative warfare that has become synonymous with American healthcare.
Coverage extends through Original Medicare nationwide, most Medicare Advantage plans, and a smattering of commercial insurers. According to company figures, 95% of users pay nothing out of pocket. Solace claims 98% report better outcomes or greater peace of mind—though that's a self-reported satisfaction measure, the kind that looks good in pitch decks but would give epidemiologists pause.
Still, more than 20,000 patients per month are using the service. That's real scale, perhaps more than Gurewitz expected when he left his growth marketing roles at Imperfect Foods and children's book subscription service Literati to launch Solace in 2022.
"The healthcare system has normalized leaving patients to figure things out themselves," Gurewitz said in a statement accompanying the funding news. "This partnership allows us to embed advocacy earlier in care, at national scale, and establish it as a permanent part of how healthcare works in the United States."
It's an ambitious vision. Whether it's sustainable depends largely on whether Medicare keeps paying—and how much.
Fast Money
Solace has torn through the venture capital gantlet with unusual speed, even by 2025 standards. The company raised $14 million in Series A last August, led by Inspired Capital, with backing from Craft Ventures, Torch Capital, RiverPark Ventures, and notable angels including Anne Wojcicki and the late Susan Wojcicki. By April, it had closed a $60 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures at roughly $300 million valuation.
Now, less than a year later, that valuation has more than tripled.
Eric Liaw, the IVP general partner who led the Series C, framed the bet in infrastructure terms. "Healthcare advocacy is moving from a discretionary service to essential infrastructure," he said. "Outcomes improve and costs come down."
Maybe. The economics here get murky fast. Bloomberg reported that Solace takes a variable cut of the Medicare reimbursements flowing to advocates who use its platform, though the company hasn't publicly disclosed exactly how that revenue split works or what margins it's capturing. That opacity is typical for young healthcare startups navigating complex reimbursement models, but it also makes assessing the long-term unit economics difficult.
What's clear is that Solace is riding a policy wave that could shift. CMS reimbursement codes have been added—and quietly removed—before. And the company's growth depends on physician practices and health systems being willing to integrate another layer of coordination into already crowded workflows.
What Comes Next
Solace plans to use the fresh capital in predictable ways: expand the advocate network, build out its proprietary EHR system designed specifically for navigators, fund clinical research to validate those rosy outcome claims, and deepen partnerships with insurers and health systems. The company already operates a referral workflow allowing clinicians to enroll patients through an eligibility check and intake visit with a Solace-employed physician, followed by monthly navigation services.
It's a land grab, essentially. Get big fast, establish network effects, become the default infrastructure before competitors crowd in.
Latham & Watkins advised Solace on the deal. Wilson Sonsini represented IVP.
For now, Solace occupies a sweet spot: solving a real problem, backed by federal dollars, with a founder who's lived the pain point firsthand. The question is whether a billion-dollar valuation reflects a durable business or just very good timing on a regulatory arbitrage play.
Gurewitz would probably say the former. But in healthcare, timing is everything—until the reimbursement codes change.
