We’re excited to share that our portfolio company Flax Health has raised $3.5M in pre-seed funding, co-led by Pear and Sorenson Capital, with participation from leading operators and angel investors in healthcare.
How we met
I originally met Trent more than six years ago when he was the teaching assistant for my class Lean Launchpad at Stanford. I witnessed first hand the dedication, enthusiasm, and genuine attention to detail that Trent put into everything he did. Once Trent was ready to start something and began ideating, we knew he was a founder we wanted to bring under the Pear umbrella. Once we met his co-founder David, we knew he had found his match. David brings deep machine learning expertise and he is the kind of leader that curious and ambitious engineers want to work for.
Why we invested
At Pear, we look for visionary founders tackling massive, under-served problems with the right mix of technical depth and domain expertise. The skilled nursing industry faces some of the toughest challenges in healthcare: growing regulatory complexity, shrinking margins, and chronic staffing shortages. Teams are drowning in paperwork instead of focusing on patient care.
Trent and David are uniquely positioned to solve this. Trent brings deep experience building enterprise AI and automation at scale from his time at Microsoft. David’s PhD work focused on extracting insights from clinical documentation, which is the very problem that bogs down skilled nursing teams every day.
Together, they’ve built a platform that goes beyond digitizing forms. Flax brings together three modules that improve workflows for nurses:
- Admissions Intelligence: Surfaces risks from referral data for faster, smarter decisions
- Intake Automation: Streamlines MDS and form completion to save staff time
- Claims Support: Builds clinically-backed claims that improve recovery rates.
The results speak for themselves: customers are already saving 11 hours per week per staff member, reducing headcount needs, and unlocking tens of thousands in new weekly revenue.
What’s Next
We believe Flax is at the forefront of a new era in healthcare operations. As AI transforms how providers interact with data, Flax has the potential to become the operating backbone for skilled nursing facilities. This will help teams reclaim time, improve financial performance, and most importantly, deliver better patient care.
This is just the beginning. We’re thrilled to partner with Trent, David, and the Flax team as they embark on this journey.