Scheduling doctor appointments is its own form of hell for both physicians and patients. Assort Health’s AI fix helped it raise its third venture round in 14 months.

Jon Wang and Jeff Liu have a thing for cowboy hats. The cofounders and co-CEOs of Assort Health wear them everywhere, including to their board meetings and, recently, to raise venture money for their startup. "I just liked the look of them, the vibe," says Liu. "It's the wild west of healthcare."

It's a shtick, of course, but it also worked. With their hats on, the duo raised their third venture funding round in just 14 months to keep building out their voice chatbot for scheduling doctor appointments. The new funding of $120 million, led by Menlo Ventures, brings Assort’s valuation to $1.2 billion, up more than 70% from its valuation of $700 million last September. Assort has now raised a total of $222 million from top investors that include Lightspeed, First Round and Chemistry.

The flood of funding reflects just how miserable it is for both patients and doctors’ offices to schedule appointments. Some 15,000 physicians, largely at specialty providers like orthopedics and dermatology, have now rolled out Assort Health’s AI voice chatbot to take all those calls for them.

Liu and Wang started the San Francisco-based company in 2023. Assort made the cut for the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list in 2025, and the cofounders subsequently gained a spot on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

As for the cowboy hats, “it’s something they have embraced as a culture,” says Menlo Ventures partner JP Sanday. “It’s a good rallying cry for the team and a great way to bond.”

Assort’s new valuation of $1.2 billion is more than 70% higher than at its previous funding round last September.

Assort’s new valuation of $1.2 billion is more than 70% higher than at its previous funding round last September.

Making appointments might sound simple, but it is its own form of hell for both doctors and patients. Patients can’t reach doctor’s offices to get appointments when they need, sometimes forgoing care because no one picks up. Meanwhile, physician groups have to deal with patients who are routed to the wrong place, fail to fill out required paperwork or don’t show up at all. “It’s one of the most broken parts of healthcare today,” Wang says.

To solve the scheduling problem, Assort developed a voice AI chatbot to search physicians’ calendars and match openings with the type of appointment required. It not only talks to customers, but also records text transcripts of those calls for analysis. To date, Assort has handled 190 million patient interactions. Forbes estimates that its annualized revenue is now above $30 million; Assort says only that it’s increased 20-fold over the past 15 months (“faster than Harvey or Decagon at our stage,” says Wang, naming the fast-growing legal AI and customer support startups). The company says that it’s seen a 75% reduction in patient hold times on the phone and that just 5% of callers hang up on their voice agents.

Scheduling is dictated by “all these complex rules that exist in a printed binder by office and group, or they’re in people’s heads,” says Menlo’s Sanday. “If you nail the scheduling, you earn their trust.”

The company has used its beachhead in scheduling to expand into other patient interactions, including callbacks, rescheduling, document wrangling and even billing. It is now building out technology that can remember patients across all these different tasks so they won’t need to constantly repeat their medical histories or requests for care. Liu says that the company is devoting $70 million from the fundraise to build out the technology, which it plans to launch in the third quarter.

Since Assort started three years ago, AI healthcare scheduling has gotten increasingly competitive, with companies such as Andreessen Horowitz-backed EliseAI (valuation: $2.2 billion) and others also seeing the potential. “There’s always a wave of new entrants that come in and signify that it’s a real market,” Wang says. “Hopefully at the end of it the loser will be the landline.”

Growing up in Northern Virginia, Liu, 29, wanted to be a fighter pilot and volunteered at a local hospital doing patient transport. He started college at Duke University as a pre-med, but switched to computer science. After school, he worked on healthcare AI and operations, including at $7 billion (valuation) Athelas, where he was head of product engineering and built out one of the earliest ambient scribes, which listen to patient-doctor conversations and turn them into clinical notes.

Wang, also 29, grew up in Minnesota, the son of an immigrant doctor who hoped he’d follow a similar career path. He started medical school at UCSF, but left to pursue entrepreneurship after co-publishing seven papers on AI and healthcare. He cofounded Shimmer, a Y Combinator-backed startup focused on preventive mental health, then spent a year as chief of staff at autism startup Elemy.

The pair were connected by a VC and immediately hit it off. In January 2023, they started Assort with the idea of using AI agents to fix scheduling. It was an idea that was ahead of its time. They approached some 45 investors to fund Assort’s seed round, before lining up $3.5 million led by Quiet Capital in March 2024. “Most people passed on us because they didn’t believe in us,” Liu recalls — even the VC who’d initially introduced them (who they declined to name).

Scheduling “is one of the most broken parts of healthcare today.” 

To start, Assort targeted orthopedics, a complex specialty because providers are highly specialized — a sports medicine doctor and a hand surgeon are not the same — and have strict rules on who they will or won’t see. From there, it branched out into 22 other specialties, including dermatology and urology. The startup recently signed on its first health system, John Muir Health, which has more than 1,000 primary care and specialty physicians and operates two large medical centers in California.

Dr. Parinita Amin, CEO of MDCS Dermatology, which has offices in New York and New Jersey, was an early customer two years ago. She was looking for help for managing the practice’s schedule, which encompasses 33 providers and 120,000 visits each year. So she interviewed a handful of different vendors. “There weren’t that many, but some of them couldn’t really do what their demos said they could do,” she says. She was so nervous that Assort’s tech would actually work that she asked Wang if he needed more time to work on the technology before she signed on. Ultimately she opted for a phased rollout.

Assort’s promises panned out, Amin says, and appointments have gone up more than 20%, as the practice hired more providers and captured patients who might have dropped off when they couldn’t reach anyone over the weekend. “Anytime you’re playing phone tag, things fall through the cracks,” she says. “People might have been skeptical from the get-go, but now if I ask anyone on the team, ‘Do we want to go back and do what we were doing before?’ the answer is, ‘No way.’”

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