Silna’s $27M Raise Signals a Shift in How Providers Handle Prior Auth

Silna Health recently emerged from stealth with $27 million in Seed and Series A funding, co-led by Accel and Bain Capital Ventures. Their mission? To eliminate one of the biggest operational burdens in healthcare: the administrative chaos surrounding prior authorizations, benefit checks, and eligibility workflows.

I had the opportunity to speak with Connor Pohl, Silna’s Founding Account Executive, and later connect with COO Sagar Jajoo at the Autism Investor Summit (AIS). Together, their vision became clear: Silna isn’t trying to reinvent billing or build another EHR. Instead, they’re focused on becoming the pre-RCM layer that clears the path for care to begin—what they call a Care Readiness Platform (CRP).

🧠 What Makes Silna Different

Silna’s approach to automation stands out in three key ways:

  • Payer-Tuned Rules Engine: Their platform is trained on the nuances of payor-specific workflows to reduce errors and increase first-pass approvals.

  • Dynamic Document Creation: Their PDF generation engine adapts to each payor’s submission requirements—a subtle but critical capability for prior auth automation.

  • Hybrid AI + Human Oversight: For complex workflows, AI handles the first pass and flags edge cases for human review, allowing them to automate ~90% of low-complexity tasks today.

This combination has already allowed Silna to scale to:

  • 50,000+ patients served

  • 45 states and counting

  • #1 Prior Auth Software on G2

🏥 Why Start With ABA?

Autism therapy and ABA providers face some of the toughest authorization processes in healthcare. Between evolving payer documentation rules, recurring reauthorizations, and a stretched administrative workforce, prior auth can directly delay care.

Even more challenging is the highly variable nature of these requirements across different states and payors. What one Medicaid plan accepts may differ entirely from another. Some require specific documentation formats; others expect standardized assessments or language unique to that plan’s policies. This patchwork of requirements turns prior auth into a high-effort, low-leverage task for most provider organizations.

Silna’s value lies in absorbing that complexity: its rules engine tunes workflows per payor, and its document generation engine tailors submissions to those unique requirements—automating what would otherwise take hours of manual review.

🔌 Integration: Necessary or Not?

When I spoke with Connor and Sagar, one thing became clear: Silna doesn’t require deep integration with your practice management or EHR system to deliver value.

Their platform is staff-facing, sitting alongside your existing tech stack. Intake and RCM teams can use it directly without major data mapping or IT overhead. While future integrations may improve workflow fluidity, Silna’s current model is refreshingly lightweight and fast to deploy—an advantage in a field where most platforms require long implementation cycles and FTE-level support.

That said, as they continue to scale, their ability to connect with EHRs or PM systems (via API or embedded workflow triggers) could become a powerful differentiator—especially for enterprise buyers or multi-site providers managing across systems.

🔮 What’s Next?

With $27M in backing and a growing footprint, Silna is doubling down on:

  • Engineering

  • Operational scale

  • Expansion into new care verticals

They’re not trying to do everything. In fact, that’s part of the appeal. As Sagar described at AIS, Silna wins by doing one thing extremely well: eliminating the bottlenecks that delay care before it even starts.

👀 Why I’m Watching Closely

In a crowded RCM landscape, Silna’s focus on upstream workflows—before claims, before billing, before denials—makes them especially relevant to ABA providers and investors alike. They’re a clear example of how AI and smart automation can improve both margins and care delivery without requiring full platform replacement.

Whether they stay focused on prior auth or grow into broader payer ops, they may have already carved out a critical niche.