January 13, 2026 lands with a quiet kind of thunder. RISA Labs closes an $11.1M Series A, and if that number feels modest compared to the noise machine elsewhere, good. Oncology does not need louder headlines. It needs time back, clarity restored, and systems that move faster than cancer. Founded by Kshitij Jaggi and Kumar Shivang, both IIT Kanpur grads who already earned their scars scaling Urban Health, RISA Labs did not show up to impress anyone. It showed up to fix something that has been broken in plain sight for decades.
RISA Labs lives where operations meet consequence. Headquartered in Palo Alto with serious gravity in Boston, the company built BOSS, an AI OS for oncology that treats workflow like infrastructure, not paperwork. Prior authorizations, benefits verification, patient access, payer complexity, all orchestrated end to end. This is not a chatbot cosplaying as productivity. This is an institutional nervous system designed to move treatment forward while everyone else is still refreshing portals and hoping the fax machine behaves.
The Series A was co-led by Cencora Ventures and Optum Ventures, two players who know exactly where friction hides in healthcare economics. Oncology Ventures returned with conviction. Z21 Ventures stayed in the fight. John Simon joined through Ventureforgood, because pattern recognition still matters when the pattern is execution. Earlier seed capital came from Binny Bansal, General Catalyst, and others who know what it takes to scale real infrastructure, not demos.
Nine months post launch, BOSS has already orchestrated more than $400M in oncology medications and infusion therapies. Prior auths that once took 30 minutes now take under five. First pass approvals sit at 97.8%. Denials drop up to 40%. Admin costs fall by 66%. Over 20 FTEs move from clicking boxes to doing work that actually helps patients. At New York Cancer and Blood Specialists, Dr. Jeffrey Vacirca and President Todd O’Connell saw administrative drag get out of the way of care. That matters more than any slide deck ever will.
The origin story holds because the math holds. Jaggi and Shivang spent years inside fragmented healthcare systems and decided to model them instead of fighting them. Digital twins. Reinforcement learning. AI agents that adapt when payer rules change at 2 a.m. BOSS does not panic. It recalculates. Oncology is the proving ground, but the architecture reaches far beyond one specialty.
RISA Labs is not selling optimism. It is selling throughput, accountability, and time. Time for clinicians. Time for patients. Time cancer never gives back. And when an operating system finally understands the business of saving lives, the industry has to decide how much longer it wants to keep moving slow.
