The funding
Almanac Health, a clinical AI startup founded by physician-researcher Cyril Zakka, has raised a $10 million seed round. F-Prime led the round, with General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating. The company said the new capital brings its total funding to just under $12 million, according to a company release distributed on Businesswire on April 22, 2026.
The round funds a platform Almanac describes as built to deliver specialist-grade knowledge to clinicians directly at the point of care, positioned as a companion to, not a replacement for, existing electronic health record systems.
What the platform does
According to Almanac Health's release and coverage by HIT Consultant, the platform is designed to sit inside existing EHR workflows rather than require clinicians to switch tools. The company says its outputs are grounded in peer-reviewed medical literature and governed by institution-level controls, a distinction it draws against general-purpose AI tools that clinical teams have been reluctant to trust for direct patient-care decisions.
Almanac says the platform is undergoing clinical validation inside academic medical center settings, though neither the company's release nor the trade coverage names the specific institutions or discloses validation results. That detail matters for a category where vendors routinely claim clinical-grade accuracy without publishing the underlying study.
Who is behind it
Zakka is a physician who also did machine learning research at Stanford, where he worked on what the company describes as one of the first retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems built specifically for clinical medicine. Coverage of the round notes that a paper from that research became one of the most-cited pieces published by NEJM AI, though the specific citation count and publication were not detailed in the company's own announcement.
The seed investors are notable for healthcare-specific reasons rather than just check size. General Catalyst has built out a health system ownership and operating arm alongside its venture investing, and F-Prime's healthcare practice has backed a run of clinical-decision-support and diagnostics companies. Their participation signals the round is being read as a healthcare bet first, an AI bet second.
What the money is for
Per the release, Almanac plans to use the funding to expand its team across clinical medicine, AI research, and health system infrastructure, and to continue investment in R&D, which the company specifically flagged as including privacy-related engineering work. No product pricing, named health system customers, or go-to-market timeline was disclosed in the announcement.
Why it is notable
Clinical decision support has become one of the more crowded corners of digital health funding in 2026, and most entrants make some version of the same safe and validated claims Almanac is making here. What differentiates this round on paper is the founder's direct clinical and research background and the stated intent to publish validation work through peer-reviewed channels rather than marketing claims alone. Whether that validation holds up, and whether health systems are willing to let a new AI layer sit between clinicians and the EHR record, will depend on data the company has not yet released.
The unanswered questions
The company has not disclosed which academic medical centers are running the validation, what the validation is measuring, or when results might be published. It also has not named a paying health system customer. Those gaps are ordinary for a $10 million seed round at this stage, but they are the facts to watch for in Almanac's next announcement, not claims to take on faith from this one.
Sources: Businesswire: Almanac Health Raises $10 Million · HIT Consultant: Almanac Health $10M Seed · Pulse2: Almanac Health $10 Million Raised · Healthcare IT Today: Weekly Digital Health Roundup