Forus founder Sahir Jaggi
Forus
Forus reached $1 billion valuation by dealing with the unglamorous admin work of processing scripts so patients can get the drugs they need.
Nearly one third of Americans never fill the prescriptions that their doctors order. Sahir Jaggi thinks AI can help.
In 2023, he started Forus (then named Tandem) to develop AI software that can handle prescriptions’ administrative backend. The moment a physician writes a scrip, Forus’s system picks it up and processes it, figuring out nitty-gritty details like what medications a patient has tried previously and whether there are restrictions on which pharmacy can fill it. Both the doctor and the patient can see what’s going on in real time. “We reduce a huge amount of headache, paperwork and phone calls,” says Jaggi, 31.
The company says that thousands of medical practices and health systems across the country currently rely on its tech, with a 10-fold annual increase for the past two years, driven almost entirely by word of mouth. Medical practices that use its software have seen an increase in prescription fill rates over time, Jaggi says.
Forus said today that it had reached a $1 billion valuation, with $160 million in total funding. Its investors include Thrive Capital, General Catalyst and Accel, each of which led a previously unannounced round of funding. Forus said that its annualized revenue surpassed $10 million by yearend, and that it has roughly quintupled so far this year. That means annualized revenue is now tracking above $50 million. Jaggi was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list in 2025.
“The most common experience patients have is getting a prescription. But despite how common it is, it is prohibitory for patients to get the medications they think they need,” says Thrive Capital partner Kareem Zaki.
A former product leader at health insurer Oscar, Jaggi had a front row seat to the morass that is prescription drug coverage. Once a doctor prescribes a medication, it needs to be routed to the best pharmacy for insurance coverage. Patients may also need help navigating affordability programs for pricey specialty medications or dealing with an insurer’s denial of coverage.
“I spent five years at Oscar, and every year I learned more about how complicated the system was and how hard it was to change from within even with the best of intentions and a lot of resources,” Jaggi tells Forbes.
“Too few drugs make it to market and too few eligible patients receive treatment.”
Jaggi, who was born to Indian immigrants, grew up in upstate New York. Both of his grandfathers were entrepreneurs, one of whom built a company manufacturing capacitors in India. After getting an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Columbia University, Jaggi landed at Oscar (cofounded by billionaire Thrive managing partner Josh Kushner). He’s one of dozens of Oscar alums who have launched companies, mostly in health tech, including Formation Bio and Garner Health.
The logistical headaches of getting drugs to patients aren’t as glitzy as using artificial intelligence for drug discovery, but AI is well-suited to tackle them. Specialty drugs are a particular problem. Novel therapies for cancers and autoimmune diseases can cost thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars. They typically require separate processing from a specialty pharmacy and extra layers of approval for patients to get them. As with all medications, Forus works through those administrative complexities. It solves “the last-mile problem,” says General Catalyst partner Chris Bischoff.
Forus’s main users are doctors and patients, but it doesn’t charge them. Instead, the company has deals with pharmaceutical giants to help them launch their drugs to the patients who need them. Developing a drug is a long, painstaking and extremely expensive process, costing well over $1 billion and taking a decade – making commercialization of those that do get approved a huge deal.
Jaggi said that half of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies are now partners, as are a number of fast-growing startups, and that the company is working on several large drug launches this year. Forus figures out how to process insurance for these new drugs and makes sure pharmacies have the medication in stock so that when doctors write those first prescriptions everything is set.
Prescription drug spending is expected to surpass $1 trillion this year, according to a new report from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists – meaning more than $300 billion worth of therapies never get to patients. Ken Frazier, a special advisor at VC firm General Catalyst and chairman of its Health Assurance Initiatives, says that while he was CEO at Merck, patients didn’t adhere to almost 50% of prescriptions and didn’t fill some 35% of new scripts. “It is totally crazy because these drugs are really beneficial to patients,” he says. “We owe it to everyone in the system to eliminate unnecessary barriers to getting the right drug to the right patient at the right time.”
In fact, about four in 10 U.S. adults have not taken their medication as prescribed over the past year due to costs, according to a recent KFF poll. Larger shares of lower income, uninsured, women, Black and Hispanic adults report drastic measures to cut costs, like swapping out their prescriptions for over-the-counter drugs or cutting pills in half.
While prescription drugs are costly, taking them as prescribed both keeps people healthier and reduces healthcare costs broadly by preventing them from serious health consequences that may require surgery or land them in the ER.
“Too few drugs make it to market and too few eligible patients receive treatment,” Jaggi says. “Science should be the only limit to medicine.”
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