Healthcare’s been living in spreadsheet purgatory, too many clinics running 21st-century medicine on 20th-century tools. Enter Planbase, the AI-native platform built to bring order to healthcare chaos. Founded in 2023 by Joe Shearman and Jack Light, a couple that codes, forecasts, and flat-out outthinks, the San Francisco-based startup just raised a $2.1M seed round led by Y Combinator and LocalGlobe, with a few stealth angels quietly betting big.
What Planbase’s doing isn’t “adding AI” to healthcare, it’s rebuilding the entire operating system. Think capacity planning that knows next week’s patient load before it hits, credentialing that auto-flags licenses before compliance teams even log in, and scheduling that plays 4D chess with time zones and specialties. It’s workforce management reimagined for the clinics juggling in-person visits, telehealth calls, and a workforce spread from Boston to Bogotá.
Before this, Joe Shearman was an engineer at McLaren Racing and a product lead in workforce management. Jack Light earned his PhD in Economics at the University of Chicago, studied at Oxford, and built optimization algorithms at Elando that scheduled 100K+ hourly workers for brands like Domino’s & Getir. Together, they saw the future of healthcare workforce ops, and decided the future needed less admin, more intelligence.
Planbase’s traction speaks louder than any press release. 800+ clinicians, 5K+ providers, and 30M+ patients are already running through its system. Their reference customer, OpenLoop Health, founded by Dr. Jon Lensing & Christian Williams, cut scheduling time by 70% and grew patient volume by 40%. When software starts saving hours by the hundreds and scaling patient access by the tens of thousands, it’s not a feature. It’s a force multiplier.
LocalGlobe’s Emma Phillips called Joe & Jack “a practical example of how AI belongs in healthcare,” and Y Combinator’s Aaron Epstein, a founder’s founder, helped them shape the playbook for revenue-driven growth. With $2.1M now fueling product expansion & engineering hires, Planbase is targeting larger clinics across the U.S. and scaling deeper into the hybrid-care frontier where few dare to build.
This isn’t about disruption. It’s precision. It’s what happens when AI stops being a headline and starts being infrastructure. Planbase isn’t chasing the hype, it’s quietly becoming the system that clinics didn’t realize they were waiting for.
