Cadence's Chris AltchekCadenceCadence reached a $1.2 billion valuation by using AI to track seniors’ chronic health conditions and improve their care.Caring for people with chronic disease accounts for the vast majority of the $5.3 trillion the U.S. spends every year on healthcare. AI can help keep seniors healthier and cut costs by monitoring common chronic illnesses like hypertension and diabetes, argues Chris Altcheck, cofounder of Los Angeles-based startup Cadence. The goal: Help people over 65 get the right medications and earlier treatment, keeping them out of the ER.“Everyone is trying to figure out how we improve outcomes for chronic disease. I think we are realizing that even if we double the number of primary care doctors it wouldn’t actually help because the way we treat disease with two-to-four doctor visits a year doesn’t work,” Altchek tells Forbes. Cadence’s clinical AI agents are hooked into devices like blood pressure cuffs and blood sugar monitors, which monitor patient vitals remotely. It combines this data with information from patients’ electronic health records to recommend if someone should adjust their medication, or change their lifestyle. That enables Cadence’s system, which is supervised by physicians, to alert a clinician when a patient is deteriorating before a stroke or heart attack, for example. Cadence touts data, published in peer-reviewed journals, that shows its model works: a 27% decrease in in-patient hospital admissions, a 230% increase in heart failure patients using recommended therapy, and a 70% increase in blood pressure control for hypertension patients. On the cost side, it showed a $1,300 per patient annual reduction in the total cost of care. The company says it saves Medicare roughly $2.7 million per week. Today, Cadence treats more than 100,000 patients at 21 health systems, ranging from academic medical centers like Duke Health to Texas Health Resources, a faith-based non-profit with 24 hospitals around Dallas-Fort Worth. Its annualized revenue is on track to reach $140 million by the end of this year, more than double last year’s $62 million and nearly seven times higher than the $21 million it reached in 2024. (A target of $140 million in annualized revenue is the equivalent of bringing in $11.7 million in monthly revenue by the end of the year.) Now the startup tells Forbes that it has raised an additional $100 million in a round led by Spark Capital, the VC firm best known for being an early backer of Anthropic. The new money brings its total funding to $241 million at a valuation of $1.2 billion, up from $1 billion at December 2021.“The way we treat disease with two-to-four doctor visits a year doesn’t work.”