Company leader
Adi Tantravahi
Co-founder and CEO
Cofactor AI
Adi Tantravahi is the co-founder and chief executive of Cofactor AI, a Chicago company whose software helps hospitals appeal insurance claim denials. He earlier worked at Princeton University as a researcher studying global conflict.
From Conflict Research to Health Care
A graduate of the University of Texas, he studied global conflict at Princeton University before he left to start a company. He picked healthcare for the size of the problem: "If I could find some way to improve the United States healthcare system, I would be creating positive value for the world."
His first step came from family. In 2023 he shadowed his aunt, a medical director, during a hospital visit, and after a long day he watched her spend hours working through a stack of insurance denials by hand.
Seventy-Two Hours
"I could not stop thinking about it," he said of that day, and he stayed up for about 72 hours working out how to solve the problem for her. Hospital executives who saw his prototype liked the idea but doubted he was the right person to build it.
He took the doubt as fuel: "For somebody that gets told 'don't push the red button' and wants to push the red button, that's a pretty big motivator."
Founding Cofactor AI
He founded Cofactor AI with chief technology officer Juan Sebastian Lozano in August 2023, and the company signed its first customer before the end of that year. Its software reads each denial alongside the patient record, payer policy and hospital contract, and drafts an appeal. Drive Capital led its $4 million seed round.
He calls the product a "value capture engine" for hospital billing teams, and he has said Cofactor is "leveling the playing field in the AI arms race between payers and providers".
Advice to Founders
He warns founders that selling into healthcare is "like eating glass", with long sales cycles, strict privacy rules and buyers who can say no but rarely yes. He still urges them toward hard fields, separating work that only takes effort from problems no one has solved: "Then there are hard problems where you're figuring out things no one's ever done".