Assured: How Rahul Shivkumar Signed Customers Before Incorporating, Hit $1M ARR in a Year and Raised a $19M Series A

November 9, 2026

TL;DR: Assured (also called Assured Health) is a New York healthcare AI company that uses AI agents to handle provider credentialing, payer enrollment and onboarding, so clinics can get newly hired providers seeing billable patients sooner. It was co-founded by Varun Krishnamurthy (CEO) and Rahul Shivkumar (President), who previously built and sold Dawn Health, a virtual sleep clinic. As Shivkumar shared on the show, two customers committed before the company was even incorporated in March 2024, and Assured reached $1M ARR in about 12 months. In July 2026, Assured announced a $19M Series A led by Insight Partners, bringing total funding to $25M. Shivkumar told the full story on The Product Market Fit Show.

A note on sourcing. Anything labeled "as he shared on the show" comes from the interview and has not been independently confirmed. Funding and company details labeled with a source and date were checked against press coverage and company announcements in November 2026.

What does Assured do?

Shivkumar gave the simplest version at the top of the episode.

"Yeah, we help healthcare organizations hire new providers as quickly as possible and get them to seeing patients as quickly as possible." — Rahul Shivkumar, Assured

Behind that sentence is a messy process. When a clinic sends an offer letter to a doctor, therapist, dietitian or physical therapist, that provider has to pass credentialing, a specialized background check. Then they have to be enrolled with each insurance company the clinic bills. Until that is done, the clinic cannot file claims for that provider's visits.

Each insurer runs its own process. Shivkumar gave an example on the show: a telehealth group whose providers are licensed in 30 states, working with four insurers per state, has to kick off about 120 insurance workflows for every single hire. Hire two providers a month and the count climbs fast.

Assured automates that work with AI agents. They verify provider information, package it, send it to insurers and follow up until the provider has an effective date. Press coverage of the Series A in July 2026 described Assured as an NCQA-certified Credentials Verification Organization headquartered in New York, whose agents check provider data against more than 2,000 primary sources.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, Assured gets providers activated about 30% faster on average, from roughly 90 days down to 60 to 65 days.

The company calls this the "front door" of revenue cycle management (RCM). RCM is the larger, crowded market for how healthcare organizations bill and collect. Shivkumar said the founders chose the front door on purpose: it was underserved, close to a much bigger market, and a problem they had lived.

Who founded Assured?

Assured was co-founded by Varun Krishnamurthy, the CEO, and Rahul Shivkumar, the President, per the company's site and Series A coverage (July 2026). The two met in college.

Before Assured, they built Dawn Health, a virtual sleep clinic that helped people with insomnia get off sleeping pills. Shivkumar described it as the perfect Assured customer. It was a telehealth clinic that hired providers full time and had to get each one paneled with insurers. As he shared on the show, about 99% of Dawn's revenue came from Medicare or commercial insurance, so a slow enrollment meant a provider on payroll who could not bill.

Dawn was acquired in 2023 by Health Care Originals, per Assured's own materials. On the show, Shivkumar called the outcome "somewhere in between": investors were happy, the founders were happy, and the business was hard to scale. He also pointed to a market shift. Telehealth boomed in 2020 and 2021, and by 2023 patients wanted to go back to in-person care.

After the sale, both founders took three or four weeks off and agreed not to talk about work. When they reconvened, they had reached the same conclusion. They should stay in healthcare, build on a problem they understood better than most, and ride the new wave of AI models. Shivkumar said the thesis was built around GPT-3: models that could reason through a task end to end would make older robotic process automation tools look outdated.

How much has Assured raised?

Figures below come from press coverage and company announcements, as of November 2026.

Seed: $6M, led by First Round Capital, with participation from Kindred Ventures, Bragiel Brothers and the founders of Atria and Grow Therapy (Fierce Healthcare and Assured's blog).
Series A: $19M, led by Insight Partners, with First Round Capital and Kindred Ventures participating again. Announced in July 2026 (Fierce Healthcare, MedCity News, Axios Pro).
Total raised: $25M after the Series A, per Series A coverage.

No valuation has been publicly disclosed. Coverage said the new money will go toward expanding the platform and growing engineering, product and go-to-market teams. In a separate interview, Shivkumar told Mergermarket the company could raise a Series B within the next 24 months.

Key stat: $25M raised in total as of July 2026, including the $19M Series A led by Insight Partners.

How did Assured find product-market fit?

Assured had demand before it had a company. The founders worked on the idea lightly over the 2023 holidays. In January 2024, their first customers committed, and the team started sprinting. Those customers were friends they had met through Dawn who were building similar businesses.

"So going into March of 2024, I think there were maybe two customers that had already committed to like using us when the product went live." — Rahul Shivkumar, Assured

Both of those customers are still with Assured today, as he shared on the show.

The V1 had a hard constraint. Credentialing at 80% accuracy is worthless, because one in five providers would end up out of network. So the team used people to close the gap. A human on Assured's team, or on the customer's team, checked each workflow before it went out. Corrections went back to engineering and to the agent itself.

"But I think human in the loop is very, very underrated." — Rahul Shivkumar, Assured

He said an early version could be something like 60% AI and 40% people, with the goal of moving to 80/20 and then 90/10 while keeping accuracy high. The trade-off was margin, not quality.

The product-market fit moment came about five months in.

"There was a week where my co-founder and I had four new customers coming on and we realized we just couldn't onboard them ourselves." — Rahul Shivkumar, Assured

That week forced their first customer success hire. As he shared on the show, average contract values were around $60K at the time. He said they are now in the six figures.

Growth came from word of mouth, referrals from happy customers, and a YC guide for healthcare companies that listed Assured as recommended infrastructure, even though Assured was not a YC company. Then early 2025 brought the jump.

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Key stat: as he shared on the show, Assured took about 12 months to reach $1M ARR, with the first quarter of 2025 as the turning point.

Why does one logo unlock a whole specialty?

The trigger for that early-2025 growth was a large dermatology practice, Assured's biggest contract at the time. The team used that name to win several more dermatology groups.

Shivkumar's lesson was that healthcare buyers think in specialties. A big hospital logo means little to a private equity backed dermatology group. Each specialty believes it is unique, even when most of the workflow overlaps.

"It was like, hey, every time we try to go after a new specialty, like get the first logo as quickly as possible, even if it's a small one, even if the deal terms aren't like super ideal, like that first customer like unlocks an entire like specialty for us." — Rahul Shivkumar, Assured

He also warned that the ROI pitch must match the buyer. For clinics short on providers, getting a dermatologist billing 30 days sooner is pure revenue. For clinics with more providers than patients, that argument falls flat. Those buyers care about scaling without growing headcount. Shivkumar said Assured typically costs about a third of the staff it replaces, so a team told to hire three more people can scale for roughly the cost of one.

How does Assured's sales machine work?

Assured looked at AI SDR tools and passed. The reason was a number.

"So I think that the decision of not going forward with it was solely based on that data point, right? It was like, hey, 8% pickup rate, they're not doing well on phone calls, let's hire people, right?" — Rahul Shivkumar, Assured

Healthcare still runs on the phone, so people answer unknown numbers. As he shared on the show, cold call pickup rates were close to 8%, versus roughly 2% he had heard in other industries. AI callers sounded robotic and annoyed prospects. So Assured hired humans.

The funnel he described on the show:

6 BDRs, each making 150 to 200 calls a day, and talking to at least 15 people a day.
About 1.9 meetings booked per BDR per week.
Demo show-up rate of about 80%, up from a low of about 60%, thanks to confirming invites on the call, a same-day text, and not booking too far out.
Lists built from the NPI registry, enriched with Clay and ZoomInfo, with Apollo as a backup source.
BDRs go to conferences too, because they know their accounts best.

BDRs earn a base plus OTE tied to qualified leads, with a tight, rule-based definition of "qualified" so nobody argues at quarter end. Closed-won deals earn more. AEs are paid 50/50 base and commission, and he said a mid-market AE is expected to close about $1.2M in ARR a year. Sales cycles run about two months.

The biggest change was in the demo itself.

"Some people may not like this, but we actually try our best to do a ton of discovery before we even show a demo. And we found that to be extremely valuable." — Rahul Shivkumar, Assured

When the founders sold, they showed everything on the first call. As Assured became multi-product and served more specialties, an 18-feature demo buried the five things a buyer cared about.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, demo-to-close went from about 18% to about 40% last quarter after moving discovery before the demo.

For stalled deals, Assured tracks touch points with the champion: a four-month, $200K deal should have at least 16. It also turns deployment time into urgency. If a customer wants to go live January 1 and deployment takes eight weeks, the contract has to be signed by the end of October. Every customer goes through a dedicated deployments team before handoff to customer success.

Key lessons from Rahul's playbook

1. Sell before you build. Two customers committed before Assured was incorporated, and both are still customers. Domain experience from Dawn Health made that possible. 2. Use humans to hit 100% from day one. Human in the loop let a V1 deliver full accuracy, with margins improving as AI took on more of the work. 3. Land one logo per specialty. A small first customer in dermatology or behavioral health opens the whole segment, even on less-than-ideal terms. 4. Let your data overrule the trend. An 8% pickup rate made human BDRs the right call while others moved to AI SDRs. 5. Do the job before you hire for it. The founders were the first BDRs, which made it easier to hire, comp and manage the role.

"So as an example, like the BDR workflows, my co-founder and I were BDRs, right?" — Rahul Shivkumar, Assured

Listen to the full interview: He had paying customers before he even incorporated, then hit $1M ARR in a year and raised a $19M Series A.

FAQ: Assured

Q: What is Assured? A: Assured (Assured Health) is a New York healthcare AI company that automates provider credentialing, payer enrollment and onboarding with AI agents. Press coverage in July 2026 described it as an NCQA-certified Credentials Verification Organization.

Q: Who is the CEO of Assured? A: Varun Krishnamurthy is co-founder and CEO. Rahul Shivkumar is co-founder and President. The two previously built Dawn Health, a virtual sleep clinic acquired in 2023.

Q: How much funding has Assured raised? A: Assured has raised $25M in total as of July 2026: a $6M seed led by First Round Capital and a $19M Series A led by Insight Partners. No valuation has been disclosed.

Q: Who are Assured's investors? A: Insight Partners led the Series A. First Round Capital led the seed and participated again in the Series A, as did Kindred Ventures. Bragiel Brothers and the founders of Atria and Grow Therapy joined the seed.

Q: Who are Assured's customers? A: Assured sells to healthcare organizations that hire providers, including telehealth groups, behavioral health practices and dermatology groups, as Shivkumar described on the show. Specific customer names were not disclosed.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

Rahul Shivkumar, Assured — co-founder and President who sold virtual sleep clinic Dawn Health, then signed customers before incorporating Assured, reached $1M ARR in about a year and raised a $19M Series A led by Insight Partners.