Zocdoc has acquired Sohar Health, the insurance verification startup co-founded by Dr Ashish Mandavia, for an undisclosed sum, the first acquisition in the New York booking platform's nearly 20-year history.
In the US, insurance decides which doctors a patient can see, what is covered and what they will pay, yet working that out is still remarkably hard. Coverage data is scattered across hundreds of payers, and confirming benefits and network status eats time for patients and front-desk staff alike. KFF research cited by Zocdoc found that half of insured adults struggle with at least one aspect of their health insurance. Mistakes at this stage turn into delayed appointments, surprise bills and denied claims.
Sohar, founded in 2023 by Mandavia, a physician, and engineer Lucas Gordon, replaces the insurance form with an API call. Given little more than a patient's name and date of birth, it finds their coverage, checks their benefits, confirms whether a provider is in-network and estimates what the visit will cost. It supports more than 1,000 US payers and is used by behavioural and digital health providers including BetterHelp, Headway, Rula and Talkiatry to speed up patient intake.
Zocdoc already knew the product well. It picked Sohar as its insurance technology partner in 2025 after evaluating alternatives, and millions of its patients have since checked their coverage through Sohar while booking care. Sohar went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch and raised a $3.8M seed round in 2025 led by Kindred Capital, with Y Combinator, Rebel Fund and Concept Ventures also backing the company.
The deal, which closed on 2 October, follows Zocdoc's launch this month of its Care Access Network, which lets partners such as Amazon Health AI, Gemini, Yelp and Blue Shield of California offer booking with more than 200,000 providers on their own platforms. Sohar will keep its name, products and customers, while its verification runs across that network. Zocdoc founder and chief executive Oliver Kharraz framed the deal as making insurance simpler at the moment of booking. For Mandavia, the aim is to spare patients "a gauntlet just to understand whether their insurance will cover it".
Sources