What You Should Know
- Village has raised $9.5M in funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Bling Capital, GTMFund, and Perceptive Ventures.
- The platform features Vera, an in-house AI agent that handles documentation, scheduling, billing, and care coordination for independent practices. The platform is the first pediatric-connected system designed to unite families, providers, and payers around coordinated care teams for children with developmental, behavioral, and mental health needs.
- Village has built the largest coordinated network of independent pediatric specialty providers in Southern California, featuring over 400 clinicians across OT, speech, physical therapy, and behavioral health.
- The company has secured major insurance contracts with Blue Cross & Blue Shield, Cigna, and United Healthcare, moving specialty care from out-of-pocket to in-network.
The pediatric specialty care market in the U.S. is notoriously fragmented, leaving the parents of 15 million children—roughly 1 in 5—to act as their own medical “quarterbacks.” Families often spend years navigating disconnected waitlists and thousands of dollars in monthly out-of-pocket costs. Village, a Los Angeles-based healthtech company, has announced $9.5 million in funding to replace this broken manual process with an AI-powered health system designed specifically for the complexities of developmental and behavioral health.
Founded by Brandon Terry and Allan Smith—former leaders at Procore Technologies—Village was born from Terry’s personal struggle to coordinate care for his daughter. The platform does not just connect families to individual therapists; it assembles and synchronizes entire multidisciplinary teams—occupational therapists, speech pathologists, and pediatricians—within a single digital environment.
AI-Driven Coordination: Introducing “Vera”
The backbone of the Village ecosystem is Vera, a proprietary AI agent designed to act as a “dedicated operations person” for every provider in the network. For independent clinicians and small practices, administrative tasks like documentation, billing, and SAE reconciliation (Serious Adverse Event) often take time away from patient care. Vera automates these end-to-end workflows, allowing clinicians to focus entirely on their patients while ensuring that progress notes and goals are shared across the child’s entire care team in real time.
This “intelligent care” layer allows families to find and afford the right specialty providers in minutes rather than months. By deploying AI agents that match families to complete, coordinated teams, Village is attempting to standardize a “whole-child” approach that has historically been reserved for only the most elite academic medical centers.
Rapid Growth and Insurance Integration
In less than a year, Village has demonstrated significant market pull, achieving 5x growth in patients served since the start of 2024. The network currently includes over 400 providers in Southern California, creating a dense infrastructure of specialized care. Critically, Village has moved beyond the “cash-pay” model that gates access to many specialty services by securing contracts with top-tier commercial insurers, including United Healthcare and Cigna.
Kesar Varma, partner at Upfront Ventures, noted that Village is the first platform built to help families avoid “guessing at costs” or coordinating between specialists who don’t speak to one another. The new funding will fuel a repeatable launch playbook as Village expands across California and into new states, leveraging its national insurance relationships to provide a modern health system for the children the current industry has left behind.
Why This Matters
By treating specialty pediatrics as a coordination problem rather than just a staffing problem, the company is building a “Virtual Health System” that doesn’t require the overhead of a physical hospital. Village isn’t just a directory; it is a clinical signals layer that ensures every member of a child’s community is working from the same playbook.
