At Flare Capital Partners, we are excited to share our investment in Onos Health, the behavioral health clinical intelligence platform for payers. Today, Onos Health announced a $17.0 million Series A financing round led by Costanoa, joined by Flare Capital Partners and a strategic investment from CVS Health Ventures.
Why We Are Excited
Behavioral health has become one of the largest and fastest-growing cost centers for health plans, yet it remains one of the least transparent and least software-enabled areas of payer operations. Despite more than $140 billion in annual direct medical spending, payers often lack the clinical visibility needed to manage quality, utilization, and outcomes. Decades of outsourcing to managed behavioral health organizations (MBHOs), combined with highly manual clinical review of unstructured documentation, have left behavioral health dependent on fragmented, underdeveloped workflows that drive inconsistent decisions, administrative burden, and reactive management.
Our recent survey of senior health plan executives reinforced what we are hearing across the market: more than 70% identified quality transparency as their top near-term priority with behavioral health consistently emerging as one of the largest and least understood condition areas. When we saw what Onos had built, we immediately recognized a rare alignment between a hair-on-fire problem for payers and a team with deep domain expertise and firsthand understanding of the challenge.
Why Now: A Generational Shift in Behavioral Health Management
Several structural forces are converging to create a “why now” moment for Onos:
- Behavioral health has become a strategic priority. As behavioral health becomes increasingly central to member outcomes and overall health, payers are rethinking how care is managed. They are bringing behavioral health capabilities in-house and moving beyond broad, reactive utilization management toward proactive, data-driven clinical management that helps members access the right care, improves quality, and embeds intelligence directly into clinical workflows.
- AI can structure previously unusable clinical data. Behavioral health documentation is dense, subjective, and inconsistent. AI now enables payers to structure this data at scale and align it to evidence-based guidelines, turning clinical review into a standardized, software-driven process.
- Legacy platforms were never built for behavioral health. Existing utilization management platforms and payment integrity vendors are optimized for medical, rules-based workflows and retrospective review, leaving behavioral health without a purpose-built system of record.
Onos sits at the intersection of these trends, offering a platform that is not only more transparent and consistent, but also structurally aligned with payer operations.
Why Onos
Onos Health is building the AI-enabled clinical intelligence platform for one of the most complex and underpenetrated areas of the payer stack: behavioral health. Today, payers rely heavily on manual processes and growing clinical teams to manage utilization, understand quality, and ensure members receive the right care.
Onos ingests unstructured clinical documentation, converts it into structured, decision-ready inputs, and applies configurable clinical guidelines to generate evidence-based recommendations, with full auditability into every determination.
We spoke with clinical and payer leaders already using the platform, and the same theme came back repeatedly: Onos mirrors how reviewers actually reason through a case, rather than repurposing a generic rules engine for behavioral health. That distinction is why we think this product holds up under real clinical scrutiny, reinforcing our conviction that purpose-built technology is needed for behavioral health.
In our view, this positions Onos to become the category-defining platform for behavioral health clinical intelligence at a time when payers are increasingly bringing these workflows in-house.
Onos supports clinical workflows across behavioral health, with particularly strong adoption in high-cost, high-variation areas such as ABA, inpatient, and SUD. The platform spans utilization management, quality and clinical review, provider engagement, and FWA detection. Onos has become the clinical intelligence layer that powers how payers manage behavioral health across their populations.
Early commercial traction reinforces this view. Onos is now trusted by three of the six largest health plans in the country, including Kaiser Permanente and Aetna, a CVS Health company, and is seeing strong pull from both payers and MBHOs, with a growing pipeline that includes several additional large national and regional plans. Customers already partnered with Onos have seen a 35% improvement in clinical standard adherence, a 75% improvement in clinical review efficiency resulting in fewer delays in care, and >6% reduction in behavioral health program costs within 12 months through improved clinical quality. Early customer feedback suggests the product is becoming embedded in daily clinical workflows, positioning Onos as a system of record for behavioral health oversight rather than a point solution.
A Team That Knows the Problem Firsthand
We are especially excited about Onos’s founding team, which combines deep payer, operational, and technical expertise.
Co-founder and CEO Akshay Agrawal is an experienced healthcare operator with a track record of building and scaling payer-facing software businesses, including leadership roles at mPulse and Presence. Across our diligence calls, Akshay was consistently described as thoughtful and deeply customer-oriented, which has translated directly into rapid sales cycles and strong early customer trust. CTO Suhaas Prasad brings experience building scalable, data-intensive platforms, having previous experience as a CTO and co-founder at a commerce platform. CPO Josh Levitan brings deep experience in healthcare data and payer workflows, having held product leadership roles at mPulse and Community Connect Labs.
The team is further supported by a highly credible advisory bench that brings deep clinical, operational, and payer credibility, and has been instrumental in shaping the product and building trust with customers.
Together, this combination of payer go-to-market, technical depth, and clinical expertise has enabled Onos to move quickly from concept to commercial traction and convinced us early that they have the potential to build a defining company in behavioral health.
Looking Ahead
We believe behavioral health is entering a generational shift—from manual, opaque utilization management to AI-enabled clinical intelligence. Onos is already demonstrating measurable improvements in consistency, turnaround time, and provider engagement, and we believe the company is well positioned to become foundational infrastructure for behavioral health management.
At Flare Capital Partners, we believe the next era of healthcare infrastructure will be defined by transparency, automation, and intelligence. Onos Health exemplifies this shift, and we are thrilled to partner with Akshay and the team as they build the future of behavioral health management.
To learn more about Onos Health: reach out to Margaret Malone (margaret@flarecapital.com), Alyssa Tsenter (alyssa@flarecapital.com), or any member of the Flare Capital Partners team — we would love to hear from you.
We are excited to be on this journey together!
Read the original announcement here.
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About Flare Capital Partners
Flare Capital Partners is the leading healthcare technology venture capital firm advancing innovation-driven companies to improve positive health outcomes, broaden care access, and lower healthcare costs. We partner with exceptional founders solving healthcare’s hardest challenges, supporting each with our deep sector expertise, unparalleled industry resources, and proven access to commercial opportunities. Our team of established investors and senior operating executives has invested in 80+ companies and has nearly $1 billion in assets under management. Learn more at www.flarecapital.com.
