From Traction to Transformation: The Nēdl Labs 2026 Blueprint

As a founder, I describe 2025 as our "Proof of Life" year. We didn't just survive the noise of the AI hype cycle; we carved out a territory of absolute certainty.

We proved that our neuro-symbolic approach to Payment Integrity isn't just a technical achievement. It is a commercial reality. With signed contracts, active discovery deals in the pipeline, and growing demand from regional and national payers, we moved past the "what if" and into the "what's next."

As we look to 2026, I am initiating what I call the "Shift Left" movement, the first step toward building the Universal AI Infrastructure for Healthcare.

2025: A Founder's Perspective on Traction

This year was about validation through execution. In a healthcare leakage crisis measured in hundreds of billions annually, where no one is winning, not patients, not providers, not payers, trust is the only currency that matters.

The Power of Paying Customers

Securing our first major contracts, including a significant relationship with a major Blue Cross payer, was a watershed moment. It demonstrated something I had believed but couldn't prove until now: payers are ready to move away from "black box" algorithms toward the defensible, transparent logic that Nēdl Labs provides.

When a health plan can explain why a claim was flagged --- not just that it was flagged --- everything changes. Appeals drop. Provider relationships improve.

What is Payment Integrity in Healthcare? | nēdl Labs

Trust compounds.

Our customer base tells the story: a major Payment Integrity vendor saw enough in our technology to become both a strategic partner and an MCO is betting on our approach. A major systems integrator signed up as an implementation partner.

With three paying customers, we have moved beyond proving product-market fit; we are now proving market pull.

The Neuro-Symbolic Breakthrough

The real story of 2025 is technical. Traditional "black box" models tell you a claim might be problematic. Our system tells you why, with traceable logic that holds up in appeals, audits, and regulatory scrutiny.

Neuro-Symbolic AI: neural networks provide the "intuition" to parse messy, unstructured healthcare data with 95%+ accuracy. Symbolic logic gives us the "rules" to validate decisions against actual contracts and policies. Neither alone is sufficient. Together, they turn policies, contracts, and clinical docs into computational rules at speed and scale.

It is a fundamentally different architecture producing fundamentally different outcomes.

The $6B+ Healthcare Efficiency Opportunity Everyone's Missing | nēdl Labs

Building a Culture of Ground Truth

Internally, we cultivated a leadership culture that mirrors our technology: high-conviction, data-driven, and radically transparent. I learned that the same level of explainability we demand from our AI should be demanded of ourselves. When I don't know something, I say so. When the data contradicts my intuition, the data wins.

The Invincible Startup | nēdl Labs

Q1 2026: Shifting Left and Empowering the Provider

The most impactful strategic decision we will execute in the coming year is our move with PMF to the provider side.

For too long, the friction between payers and providers has been treated as an inevitable cost of doing business. Consider a Type 1 diabetic whose insulin was denied due to a coding error. Six months. Three appeals. She nearly rationed life-saving medication. Her doctor's staff spent 12 hours on her case alone, 3 unpaid peer-to-peer calls, and delayed care for other patients. Her insurer eventually paid after an appeal, incurring hundreds in processing costs for a claim they should have approved initially.

This story repeats millions of times annually.

One in five insured Americans faces a claim denial each year. Providers spend tens of billions annually on claim disputes. And with 30--45% of denials ultimately overturned, the entire system is burning resources on friction that helps no one.

That friction isn't a feature of healthcare; it's a failure of infrastructure.

By "shifting left", we will bring our Neuro-Symbolic platform directly to the point of service, before a claim ever leaves the provider's system.

We are partnering with existing payer customers and strategic partners to introduce our platform to their provider networks, not for denial management, but for denial prevention. This is a meaningful difference.

Denial management fights fires after they start. Denial prevention stops them from igniting. We will help providers submit clean claims from day one while identifying underpayments they've been leaving on the table.

The Great Shift Left: How Neuro-Symbolic AI turns Denial Management into Prevention | nēdl Labs

Today, a provider submits a claim, a payer flags it weeks later, and both sides spend months in appeals and rework. What if instead, providers had access to the same "payer-grade" scrutiny before submission? What if they could catch the variance, fix the documentation, and submit a clean claim the first time?

This is not just a platform. It is a shield against denials and a catalyst for faster revenue cycles. More importantly, it creates something that has never existed in healthcare: a common interop layer. When both the provider and the payer operate on the same underlying logic, the friction disappears. We move from a world of claims and appeals to a world of validated transactions.

By Q4 2026, we expect to have our first payer-provider pairs using Nēdl simultaneously. That is when network effects begin.

The Vision: Building Universal AI Infrastructure

As a founder, my eyes are fixed on the horizon beyond 2026. Our mission isn't to be just another PI or RCM company. It is to build the Universal AI Infrastructure that powers the entire healthcare ecosystem.

We would be "Stripe for payments + Cursor for claims editing."

Stripe didn't just process payments; it abstracted away the complexity of financial infrastructure so developers could build on top of it. Cursor didn't just edit code; it made AI-native development the default. That's what we're building for healthcare.

The current healthcare stack is a fragmented mess of legacy EHRs, siloed databases, and manual workarounds. Every payer has different rules. Every provider has different systems. The result is an industry that spends billions on administrative complexity that does not help anyone get healthier.

We're building the connective tissue.

The Roadmap

We are not naive about what it takes to build infrastructure. Here is how I see the path, knowing it will evolve as we learn.

In 2026, we establish our dual-market beachhead: proving value on both the payer and provider sides, displacing legacy vendors, and scaling to tens of customers. Every deal will teach us something.

By 2027, we aim to become an interoperability infrastructure, the Interop layer for real-time payment adjudication. At 20--30% penetration on either side, network effects should pull the other side in. Getting there requires partners who share this vision.

By 2028--29, the goal is to achieve a significant share of U.S. healthcare payments flowing through Nēdl, with major payers and providers on the platform.

This takes more than execution; it takes customers willing to co-build, vendors willing to integrate, and investors who understand infrastructure compounds slowly, then suddenly.

By 2030 and beyond, we aspire to become the AI brain for healthcare finance. Provider tools, patient tools, payer tools, all unified. It's a 5-year-long ambition. We'll need help getting there.

If you see the same future we do, as an investor, a customer, or a partner, we would love to build it together.

The Network Effects

What makes this vision achievable is the compounding nature of our data flywheel. Every claim process made our knowledge graph smarter, improving the platform for all customers.

Cross-side intelligence creates mutual benefits. When our payer learns that a CPT code is often bundled incorrectly, our provider tool learns to check bundling when billing that code. The provider submits cleaner claims and gets fewer denials. Both sides win. When a provider flags an underpayment on a DRG, the payer learns their adjudication has a rate error. The payer fixes it and sees fewer disputes. Both sides win.

Payment Integrity as a Trust Problem, Not Just a Financial Problem | nēdl Labs

Leading into the New Frontier

The leap from 2025 to 2027 is a leap from product-market fit to platform-market dominance.

My commitment to our team, our customers, and our partners is to continue leading with the same "neuro-symbolic" balance that defines our technology. We will be bold in our vision but disciplined in our logic. We will acknowledge what we don't know while moving decisively on what we do know.