Problem

Understood Care addresses the complexity and administrative burden of navigating U.S. healthcare, especially for Medicare beneficiaries managing multiple diagnoses, medications, appointments, coverage rules, and social needs. The pain is both practical and economic: barriers involving technology, finances, transportation, and health literacy can prevent people from accessing care, worsen outcomes, and increase system costs. The addressable problem is large, encompassing roughly 68 million Medicare patients today and a projected 80 million by 2030.

The core use case is a Medicare patient who cannot independently overcome an access barrier: for example, someone who can no longer drive to appointments, cannot afford medications or nutritious food, or has received a confusing diagnosis and needs help coordinating specialists and next steps. Understood Care’s model is designed to make this assistance affordable because Medicare coverage means most patients pay nothing out of pocket.

Product / Service

Understood Care is a virtual patient-advocacy and care-navigation service that matches Medicare patients with a dedicated human advocate. Patients sign up online or by phone, complete an insurance and clinical intake, and are matched with an advocate who helps schedule appointments, coordinate clinicians, complete applications, find transportation and community resources, manage paperwork and claims, pursue medication savings, and address other barriers to care. The service is delivered remotely by phone and video rather than through in-person visits.

The delivery model combines human support from advocates with doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, plus AI automation behind the scenes. Its AI co-pilot helps surface relevant benefits and resources and reduces administrative work, allowing an advocate to handle more patients while maintaining one-to-one support. The benefit is a persistent healthcare guide who understands the patient’s situation, follows up on unresolved issues, and can improve access, affordability, coordination, and confidence in care decisions.

Market

Understood Care competes in patient advocacy, healthcare navigation, care coordination, and Medicare-supported community-health services. It positions itself against traditional case management, standalone Medicare brokers, and generic helplines by offering a dedicated advocate from intake through resolution. Solace is a named comparable patient-advocacy provider in the evidence, while conventional care-navigation and benefits-navigation organizations are adjacent alternatives rather than exact matches. Understood Care differentiates through a Medicare-focused, virtual, AI-supported model and by billing through CMS-recognized advocacy codes.

The company is operating commercially rather than appearing pre-launch. It launched patient care in March 2025, expanded across all 50 states within eight months, and was reported in 2026 to be serving more than 5,000 patients, with patients and advocates engaging frequently and relationships established with three of the largest Medicare Advantage plans. It raised $8.4 million in total funding, including a $5 million seed round and $3.4 million in pre-seed financing, and was targeting more than 10,000 new patients in 2026. The available evidence does not disclose revenue, but the Medicare reimbursement model, nationwide operations, payer relationships, and patient volume indicate early commercialization rather than a pre-revenue concept.