IIT Kanpur alumni-founded RISA Labs raises $3.5 million to eliminate delays in cancer care

RISA Labs, a Silicon Valley-based healthtech startup founded by IIT Kanpur alumni, has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round to accelerate its mission of eliminating delays in cancer care caused by prior authorization bottlenecks.

The round was led by Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, with participation from Oncology Ventures, General Catalyst, z21 Ventures, ODD BIRD VC, and Ashish Gupta.

The capital will support the startup's goal to deploy its flagship platform, BOSS (Business Operating System as a Service), across 100 cancer centers in the United States over the next two years. Designed specifically for the complexity of healthcare systems, BOSS automates time-consuming administrative workflows and dramatically cuts down delays in treatment.

“Prior authorizations remain one of the least automated parts of our healthcare system,” said Ben Freeberg, Managing Partner at Oncology Ventures.

“In oncology, the stakes are higher. Seventy percent of cancer patients experience delays in care because of prior authorization requirements. In 33% of those cases, the delay is one month—a time window that can increase the risk of death by 13% in certain cancer types. The current system isn’t just inefficient – it’s dangerous.”

BOSS works by decomposing dense workflows into micro-tasks that are then executed by a digital workforce comprising large language models (LLMs), digital twins, and reinforcement learning agents. Rather than layering AI on top of existing systems, the platform embeds intelligence deep into operations, enabling a 1,000-person organization to function with the productivity of a 2,000-person one overnight.

“At a time when we’re drowning in software and the labor to operate it is stretched thin, BOSS is an AI operating system designed for the post-ChatGPT era—where work is no longer about learning tools, but expressing intent,” said Kshitij Jaggi, RISA Labs co-founder and CEO.

At one U.S. cancer center, BOSS reduced prior authorization times from 30 minutes to under five, processed over $1 million worth of medication, and freed up 80% of administrative staff time—delivering a 66% reduction in costs.

“Cancer care is time sensitive. Every delay in treatment can affect outcomes,” said Dr. Jeffrey Vacirca, CEO of New York Cancer and Blood Specialists. “Prior authorizations continue to slow us down. What RISA is building is not just smart technology. It removes barriers so our teams can move faster and stay focused on what matters most: caring for patients.”

Who are the founders?

Founded in 2024 by Jaggi and CTO Kumar Shivang—who previously built Urban Health—RISA Labs was born from the founders’ frustrations with the fragmented, high-friction workflows they encountered in the healthcare system. Their solution was to build not just a smarter tool, but a foundational AI system capable of understanding and orchestrating institutional operations end to end.

“BOSS is low-entropy system design to bring flow state in system-2 thinking for LLMs,” said Shivang. “Its orchestration layer turns that intelligence into precise, real-time execution with integrations into systems of record like Flatiron Health’s EMR.”

The team’s academic exploration of these ideas led to their co-authored paper, Digital Twin Ecosystem in Oncology Clinical Operations, which laid the conceptual groundwork for what would later become RISA’s commercial platform. “RISA’s BOSS leads the way—proven in oncology and built to scale,” said lead investor Binny Bansal.

“As AI agents unbundle the $4.6 trillion services industry, RISA stands out by turning automation into real-world clinical impact.”

Going forward, RISA plans to expand across multiple touchpoints in oncology—from providers and life sciences companies to care coordination platforms—positioning itself as the AI orchestration layer for the entire cancer care ecosystem.