Ask any American who's moved cities or switched insurance about their medical history, and you'll likely hear a familiar story of frustration. Records scattered across a half-dozen portals. Passwords forgotten. Some test results trapped in one system, specialist notes in another, prescription history in a third. It's a mess—and worse, one that can have real consequences when a new doctor needs context quickly.
Hubble, a startup fresh out of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, thinks it has an answer. The company—just two founders, both with credentials from Big Tech and healthcare's trenches—has built what it describes as "the intelligence layer for patient information." Translation: a platform that promises to pull together your complete medical history from dozens of fragmented systems through a single authorization.
It's an audacious pitch. Whether two people can actually deliver on it is another question entirely.
What Hubble Actually Does
At its core, Hubble's platform lets patients authorize the company to retrieve their medical records from every health system they've ever touched. That spans electronic health record portals (think Epic's ubiquitous MyChart), health information exchanges, insurance claims databases, and more. The company says it covers 40-plus systems, including the big players: Epic, Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), athenahealth, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna.
Once Hubble pulls in those disparate records, it normalizes them—converting a patchwork of different data formats into something coherent—and makes them available through an API. For developers building healthcare apps, or operations teams drowning in administrative work, the promise is straightforward: one connection instead of dozens.
The company retrieves data through three methods, ranging from elegant to brute force. Direct API connections where they exist. Browser automation—essentially mimicking human clicks—for systems that don't offer proper APIs. And, perhaps more tellingly, voice retrieval for the real outliers. (Yes, that means having someone actually call and navigate phone trees in some cases.)
Hubble says the platform is "live in production" across these systems, though customer names remain conspicuously absent from its public materials. The company's website displays a workflows dashboard showing metrics around revenue recovery and automation, but they're clearly marked as illustrative examples, not verified outcomes from actual clients.
Legal Scaffolding and Market Timing
The technical challenge is only part of the equation. Hubble's operating on legal ground that's both well-established and still evolving.
The company positions itself as what's called a Request-Only Individual Access Services provider under TEFCA—the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, which governs how health information gets exchanged nationwide. Its privacy documentation clarifies that when serving consumers directly, it doesn't meet the definition of a HIPAA covered entity. Instead, it's leveraging the HIPAA right of access, which allows individuals to obtain their medical records and direct them to third parties, alongside the 21st Century Cures Act's information-blocking rules.
Identity verification meets NIST IAL2 standards, run through a certified third-party provider. Certain records—substance use treatment data under federal regulations, psychotherapy notes, minors' information—require additional authorization beyond the general request.
The timing of Hubble's launch isn't coincidental. 1upHealth, an established player in patient data access, recently announced it would discontinue sales and sunset its Patient Connect product by September 30, 2026. That's created something of a vacuum in the market, just as the TEFCA network hit a milestone of more than 1 billion health records exchanged and updated Individual Access Services procedures came into effect.
Whether that vacuum represents genuine opportunity or a warning sign is hard to say. Markets don't typically open up because everything's going well.
The Founders
Hubble's two-person team brings an interesting mix of experience, though it's the kind that looks impressive on paper and still leaves you wondering if it's enough.
One founder came from Grow Therapy, where they were the first product hire and helped scale the company through what the startup world would call a rocket ship trajectory—$90 million to $3 billion valuation. They launched AI features there and, before that, spent time in product and marketing at Meta.
The other worked as a tech lead at Amazon One Medical, managing a team of more than 50 engineers building in-house EHR and AI tools for over a million patients. Earlier, they built the data platform for Amazon Care, the company's short-lived healthcare venture that Amazon eventually shuttered.
Big company experience doesn't always translate to startup success, of course. And healthcare is littered with projects that looked promising before colliding with the industry's notorious resistance to change.
Beyond Patient Access
Hubble isn't just pitching patient-mediated access. The company also offers what it calls provider-mediated access on the same platform—authorized reads and writes in EHR and insurance portals for treatment, payment, and operations workflows. Checking eligibility and benefits, scheduling, claims processing, document uploads. The usual administrative thicket that consumes so much time in healthcare.
This dual model—patient and provider access through one API—is what Hubble says distinguishes it from competitors focused on just one side. The platform also includes a workflow studio that supposedly lets non-technical operations staff compose automation in plain language. LinkedIn posts from the team mention field research with front-desk and insurance verification staff, trying to understand their daily frustrations.
The company closed an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round, though the amount and investors remain undisclosed. As part of Y Combinator's cohort, Hubble enters a network that has produced significant health tech companies over the years—though for every success story, there are plenty of companies that never make it past Series A.
The Crowded Field
Here's the challenge: the market for patient data infrastructure is already packed with well-funded, more established players. Particle Health, Health Gorilla, b.well (which powers ChatGPT's health data features). These aren't scrappy startups anymore; they're companies with substantial engineering teams and existing customer bases.
Can two founders, however talented, really deliver on the promise of universal patient record access when larger teams have struggled with the same problem? The technical complexity alone is daunting—not just the initial integrations, but maintaining them as systems change, handling edge cases, ensuring data quality, navigating the endless variations in how different providers structure information.
Then there's the sales and customer success side. Healthcare organizations don't typically move fast on vendor decisions. They want references, security audits, proof of HIPAA compliance, evidence that you'll still be around in two years to support the integration. A two-person team, no matter how capable, faces an uphill battle on that front.
Still, maybe that's exactly the kind of team that can move quickly enough to capitalize on the moment. 1upHealth's exit does create an opening, and fresh TEFCA regulations might finally provide the standardization needed to make this kind of platform work. Perhaps a lean, focused team without layers of process can iterate faster than established players weighed down by existing customer commitments and technical debt.
Or perhaps not. Healthcare has a way of humbling ambitious technologists who think they can code their way through its structural problems. For patients stuck logging into a dozen portals just to see their own medical history, though, it's worth hoping someone finally cracks it.
