Holden Karau had battled her health insurance company a time or two before, but when a driver in an SUV slammed into her Vespa in 2019 while trying to make a left turn across four lanes of San Francisco traffic, things were different.

“I’d had a number of denials before, but they were all sort of spaced out,” she says. “When I got hit by a car, everything just happened all at once. And it was like, ‘Oh, this paperwork is insurmountable.’”

Karau’s career in technology began with building search and recommendation tools using early versions of artificial intelligence (AI). The accident got her thinking about ways to leverage similar technology to help patients deal with insurance companies.

But it wasn’t until her next insurance fight — this time with her pet insurance company — that she

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