While much of healthcare technology races to build AI-powered clinical assistants, one company founded by industry veteran Jonathan Bush is taking a different approach: building the data foundation those AI tools desperately need to function. Zus Health announced it has secured $33 million in Series B funding to expand its nationwide patient data infrastructure, bringing the company's total capital raised to over $100 million since its 2021 founding.

The round, led by Drive Capital with participation from Sanofi Ventures, HealthX Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, reflects a growing recognition that fragmented patient data remains healthcare's fundamental bottleneck—one that no amount of sophisticated AI can overcome without reliable, connected information.

The Infrastructure Play Behind Healthcare's AI Ambitions

Zus Health isn't building AI copilots or clinical decision support tools directly. Instead, the company positions itself as providing the essential connected patient data layer that AI healthcare applications require to deliver on their promises. At the core is the Zus Aggregated Profile (ZAP), a unified, longitudinal patient record that pulls together fragmented clinical information from EHR networks, pharmacy data, care event notifications, labs, and other sources into a single FHIR-native platform.

The scale of operations suggests significant market traction: in August 2024 alone, the platform processed 110 million networked transactions, and has generated 39 million AI-powered evidence citations year-to-date across its solutions. The company's three-layer architecture—nationwide patient record, data network, and AI-enabled workflows—can be deployed as a standalone app, API, embedded components, or direct EHR integration.

Bush's strategic thesis is provocative: "all electronic medical records in the future will be national," he told Fierce Healthcare. Rather than competing on AI applications themselves, he argues competitive advantage will come from data infrastructure that makes those applications reliable and scalable.

From Value-Based Care to Specialty Medicine

Zus Health serves value-based care organizations, digital health companies, provider organizations, and diagnostics and precision medicine companies with use cases spanning pre-visit preparation, transitions of care, risk adjustment, quality gap closure, and population health management. The company, recognized as a Fierce 15 of 2025 honoree, reports particularly rapid expansion in specialty care, especially oncology.

In specialty settings, the platform's Generated Patient Summaries (GPS) feature uses AI to transform fragmented records into actionable information, enabling more efficient review of treatment eligibility, clinical trial criteria, and genetic testing—work that traditionally required extensive manual effort. For patients, consolidated records reduce the burden of repeating medical histories at every appointment and relying on memory for past treatments.

The Interoperability Bet

The funding reflects a fundamental wager on interoperability as the foundation for AI-enabled care transformation. While individual healthcare AI applications may capture headlines, Zus's approach suggests the real value creation—and investment opportunity—lies in solving the unglamorous but essential problem of connecting disparate data sources into a continuously updated, reliable foundation.

For healthcare providers, this addresses the persistent challenge of incomplete information scattered across multiple EHR systems. For health tech companies building AI tools, it eliminates the need to construct their own connectivity infrastructure. The question now is whether Zus can establish itself as the standard middleware layer for healthcare's AI future—or whether larger EHR vendors and tech platforms will ultimately control this critical infrastructure.

Sources

  1. Zus Health secures $33M to build the infrastructure for AI-powered clinical workflows — Fierce Healthcare