Healthcare’s been trying to play catch-up with innovation for decades, dragging fax machines into the 21st century like they’re vintage. But specialty drug access? That’s a different beast. It’s not just outdated. It’s a Kafkaesque maze where the patient gets lost, the provider drowns in paperwork, and the treatment, yeah, the one meant to save lives, sits on pause while admin chaos runs the show.
Now enter Mandolin, and no, this isn’t some sleepy acoustic startup. This is a precision instrument slicing through $250 billion in specialty drug dysfunction. Founded in 2024 by Will Yin (CEO) and Rohit Rustagi (COO), this San Francisco-based team is tuning the healthcare system to a new frequency, one powered by AI agents that don’t sleep, don’t miss steps, and sure as hell don’t get stuck on hold with a payer portal.
These aren’t chatbots masquerading as “helpful.” We’re talking autonomous AI agents operating like fully trained back-office veterans, automating everything from referral intake and benefits verification to medical policy review, claim management, and appeals. No new APIs. No IT lift. Just plug in and watch time-to-treatment drop by 80%, denial rates tumble, and clinics finally get breathing room to treat instead of triage admin overload.
And it’s working. Since launching this year, Mandolin’s deployed in over 700 infusion clinics across the country, touching 250,000+ patient journeys annually. Real names, real scale: Vivo Infusion, FlexCare Infusion, TwelveStone Health Partners, OI Infusion, and Amber Specialty Pharmacy, all using Mandolin to do in hours what used to take days or weeks. That’s not automation. That’s operational liberation.
The market’s listening and writing checks. Mandolin just raised a $40 million seed + Series A combo. Greylock Partners led the Series A, with SignalFire and Maverick Ventures co-leading the seed. Add in SV Angel, Timeless Ventures, and operators like Jerry Yang (Yahoo!), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), and Jesse Zhang (Decagon), and you’ve got a cap table that reads like a who’s who of people who don’t bet on half-baked ideas.
For Will Yin, this isn’t theoretical. He’s lived healthcare inefficiencies, watching a family member fight the Alzheimer’s admin gauntlet. From neuroscience research at Stanford to co-founding Jupiter to time in the trenches at Palantir and Virtualitics, the guy’s not here to disrupt. He’s here to reconstruct. Rohit Rustagi? Biomedical engineer, Fulbright Scholar, Harvard-trained bioethicist, Stanford Med admit (deferred), and co-founder of two prior healthcare startups. Together, they’re not just building software, they’re building a new operating system for access.
Healthcare doesn’t need more dashboards or dashboards for dashboards. It needs agents who move like mission-critical ops. That’s Mandolin. And this funding? It’s fuel to scale their AI workforce, triple patient volume, and finally bring specialty access into the modern era, one automated decision at a time.
