Charta raises $55 million as Oura buys Counsel for $625 million

Two deals, one thesis

Charta raised $55 million in a Series B funding round, Madrona reports, and has raised a total of $85 million across three funding rounds in under two years, with revenue growing 10x over the past year. Oura has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Counsel Health for $625 million in cash, and the transaction is expected to close before the end of the calendar year 2026. The two deals are different sizes and different shapes, a venture round and an acquisition, but they share a thesis: the money in health AI is moving to the places where a wrong answer costs someone money or a missed call costs someone care. Charta works on the chart that decides payment. Counsel works on the moment a patient needs a clinician. Neither sells a model. Both sell the layer around the model that makes it usable. m:…2699 m:…1349

The Charta round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Madrona, Bain Capital Ventures, South Park Commons and QuantumLight. Charta for Payers launches with the Series B funding and covers risk adjustment coding, audit and validation, and HEDIS quality measures. The logic of the investment, as Insight puts it, starts with the chart: medical charts serve as the backbone of truth for healthcare transactions, every dollar spent on US healthcare visits originates from a medical chart, and medical charts are frequently incorrect. Clinicians are responsible for documenting healthcare visits, coders convert clinical notes into billing codes, and health plans verify whether documentation supports the billing claim. Every step in that chain is a place where an error becomes a denial, and a denial becomes an appeal, and an appeal becomes cost. Charta built the payer suite in collaboration with one of the country's largest health insurers, which is the kind of detail that matters more than the round size: the customer helped build the product. m:…2699 m:…8341

The chart is the product

Hospitals and health systems spent more than $25 billion on claims adjudication in 2023, and nearly $18 billion of the $25 billion spent on claims adjudication in 2023 was potentially wasted on denials and appeals. most of the money spent deciding who gets paid was, on Madrona's account, potentially wasted. Charta requires its engineering and growth teams to obtain Certified Professional Coder credentials, a detail that says something about how the company sees its own product. It is not selling an AI that reads charts; it is selling a team that knows what a coder knows, with AI doing the reading. The founders, Justin Liu and Scott Morris, previously worked at Rockset, which was acquired by OpenAI. The pedigree is useful, but the credential requirement is more telling: in a market where the chart decides payment, the company that wins is the one that understands the chart the way a payer does. m:…2699 m:…1349

Oura's own numbers explain why it can afford the Counsel deal. Oura's fiscal year 2026 revenue was approximately $1.75 billion, its revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter ended September 30, 2026, was $533 million, and its Q4 2026 Adjusted EBITDA was $87 million, representing a 16 percent margin. Those are the company's own reported figures, and they describe a hardware business with real revenue and real margins buying a services business. The acquisition price, $625 million in cash, is roughly a third of a year's revenue. That is a large bet for a company of this size, and it only makes sense if the services business changes what the hardware is worth. m:…1349

The clinic visit is the product

Counsel's clinical AI uses specialized agents for medical history-taking, guideline retrieval, records review and emergency detection, Oura says, and its physicians use a proprietary Clinician Cockpit to synthesize medical records and longitudinal health trends. More than 90 percent of Counsel users surveyed say Oura data helped them get better care. Counsel's average physician response time is two minutes, 96% of medical concerns addressed by Counsel are resolved without escalation, and Counsel has been made available to more than 8 million Americans. The acquisition aims to shorten the time between noticing a health change and receiving medical guidance, according to Counsel's own account. The pitch, in plain terms, is that a ring that notices a problem is only half a product. The other half is a clinician who answers in two minutes and resolves the concern without sending the person to an emergency department. m:…1349 m:…1386

Counsel Health will continue to serve existing and new enterprise partners after the acquisition, and Oura and Counsel plan to focus on preventive, acute and specialty and chronic care. Counsel's platform will not require the purchase of Oura Rings for enterprise partners, and Counsel will continue to forge partnerships with health plans and health systems. That commitment matters because it answers the obvious worry: that Oura bought a care company to sell more rings. The stated plan is the opposite, to keep Counsel open to partners who never buy a ring. The two deals together describe a health AI market that has moved past the model: the winners this week are the company that fixes the chart and the company that answers the call. A founder pitching a clinical model should read that as a warning. The model is not the product anymore; the payment and the care around it are. m:…1349 m:…1386