Huntington is investing $4.8 million in Tampa healthcare payment startup Veuu, a machine learning platform that addresses unpredictability and lengthy cycle times in payments between insurance companies and healthcare providers.
Veuu solves key pain points for providers in claims coding, risk adjustment and adjudication processes, which has long been a neglected area of the healthcare ecosystem, said Veuu founder and CEO Terence Mills.
The investment from Columbus-based Huntington (Nasdaq: HBAN), one of the top 20 largest banks in the U.S., follows a major expansion of the bank’s healthcare practice over the past decade and efforts to address liquidity concerns of healthcare clients, said Dan Storer, Huntington senior managing director of corporate healthcare banking.
“The medical receivables healthcare market has been ignored for a long time,” Storer told Tampa Bay Business Journal, a sister publication to Columbus Inno.
“We were looking at a variety of software vendors that could help us solve a variety of problems in revenue cycle management," he said. "Veuu’s solution is different; their artificial intelligence software takes care of a root-cause issue.”
The deal was led by Huntington Corporate Ventures, an in-house team developing partnerships and equity investments aimed at accelerating the bank's business lines.
Since Huntington was the first institutional investor in Drive Capital LLC, the now-$2.2 billion venture capital firm in the Short North, the bank has not made a lot of public VC deals before this year.
In June Huntington invested in a Minneapolis VC firm, in the territory it added with the acquisition of the former TCF Bank. The $3 million commitment was to Brown Venture Group, which focuses on Black-, Latino- and Indigenous-owned tech startups.
Veuu uses machine learning and AI to code claim, assess its risk profile, and ultimately issue a payment instantaneously in a process that Mills refers to as “adjudication at discharge,” meaning a payment is initiated at the moment a patient leaves their provider, he said.
Mills launched Veuu in Tampa in 2020 as a spinoff from AI.io, an AI-focused company he formed in New York around seven years ago.
Building Veuu in Florida, one of the largest U.S. healthcare markets, was a strategic decision, Mills said.
“A business just can’t be started in New York City today in a fiscally responsible way; it’s just too tough,” he said.
Veuu has around 46 employees in Tampa in database engineering and financial security roles, as well as in-house medical experts, Mills said. He is among backers who have invested nearly $10 million since its founding.
