Problem

Counsel Health addresses the friction, fragmentation, and cost of conventional healthcare access. Patients often face episodic treatment, delayed appointments, limited continuity, and expensive specialty care, while employers and health plans absorb unnecessary urgent-care, emergency-room, and downstream utilization. Counsel identifies a particularly acute economic gap: traditional specialty visits can cost roughly $100–$600 depending on insurance, while payer costs are expected to rise as chronic-condition management and specialty medications become more expensive.

The killer use case is a modern front door to care: a patient messages a medical question and receives rapid, personalized guidance, triage, follow-up, or escalation without first scheduling an office or video visit. This is especially useful for urgent but non-emergency questions, second opinions, lab or medication questions, and ongoing management of conditions such as hypertension, obesity, and high cholesterol.

Product / Service

Counsel is a full-stack, AI-enabled virtual medical group that delivers care primarily through asynchronous messaging. Its AI helps collect medical history, surface relevant records and clinical guidelines, route specialized tasks, summarize context, and support physicians through a clinician cockpit. Board-certified, in-house physicians remain responsible for diagnosing, prescribing, and guiding care, while the system maintains context across conversations to make care more continuous and personalized. The service covers instant medical advice, results review, lab ordering, medication management, urgent care, second opinions, and selected lifestyle and chronic-condition services.

The model is offered directly to consumers and through employers, health plans, provider organizations, and other healthcare companies. Consumer pricing includes a $29 consultation with condition-specific follow-up and ongoing AI-powered advice, while its premium Signature membership includes expanded services. Counsel says its model delivers physician responses in about two minutes, resolves 96% of issues without escalation, and generates $381 in annual savings per engaged member; by July 2026 it had also announced Counsel Studio, a deployment platform for bringing its physician-supervised care into existing healthcare applications.

Market

Counsel competes in digital health, telemedicine, asynchronous clinical messaging, and AI-enabled virtual primary care. Its differentiation is not simply a chatbot: it combines a messaging-first experience, longitudinal patient context, proprietary workflow software, medical AI, and in-house physician oversight. Directly comparable companies cited in the market include CirrusMD, an on-demand text-first telehealth provider, and 98point6, which uses an AI chatbot to collect and relay information to a provider. Counsel also overlaps with broader virtual-primary-care, urgent-care, and employer-health platforms.

The company is launched and operating rather than merely pre-revenue or pre-product, although the available evidence does not disclose revenue. It launched in 2024 with $11 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, subsequently raised a $25 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz alongside GV in October 2025, and has partnered with health plans and provider organizations. It initially operated in California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, and Texas, with plans to expand nationally, and its disclosed operating metrics—96% issue resolution without escalation, two-minute physician response times, and $381 annual savings per engaged member—indicate early commercial and clinical traction.