SpendRule raises $2M, emerges from stealth to help hospitals track spending

Last year, Chris Heckler was nearing the end of a five-year non-compete following the sale of his previous healthcare startup. “I was sitting on the sidelines doing angel investing, and I realised I was too young to retire,” he said. “I wanted to get back into it.”

Around the same time, Joseph Akintolayo had just sold his fintech company. He was also under a non-compete, but spent that period developing ideas for a new business. Akintolayo already knew Heckler, having previously served as an advisor on one of Heckler’s projects.

During this downtime, the two wanted to build something together—combining Heckler’s industry relationships with Akintolayo’s experience in AI and supply chains—to create a new platform.

That effort resulted in SpendRule, which launched last summer as an AI-powered platform designed to help healthcare systems track and manage their spending. The company emerged from stealth on Tuesday after raising $2 million in a round led by Abundant Venture Partners. Other participants included MemorialCare Innovation Fund and Zeal Capital Partners.

Today, when an item has a barcode, health systems typically rely on a three-way match, Akintolayo, the company’s CTO, said, linking a purchase to an invoice. But health systems often have purchases and contracts, such as maintenance, janitorial, translation services, or laundry, that lack documentation or easily traceable purchase receipts.

Because these catespending categories are often complex to manage, overspending is common. SpendRule aims to ensure that hospitals pay only what was negotiated in their contracts. The platform integrates with and operates on top of a hospital system’s existing enterprise resource planning, contract management, and accounts payable workflows. It pulls details from contracts, invoices, internal databases, and vendor data to validate invoices before payment is released.

The system flags discrepancies and guides teams on when to pay and when not to. Hospitals typically hire an auditor every two years to perform this work or conduct manual invoice reviews. This time-consuming process is increasingly suited for automation in the current wave of AI. Akintolayo said healthcare systems, including Kettering Health, MemorialCare, and MUSCHealth, are already using the platform.

Heckler and Akintolayo started the company only last summer, but still managed to close the round by Halloween, largely because of Heckler’s industry connections. “We were able to painlessly close that initial round and use that to grow the team to support the customers,” he said. The new funding will be used to hire and continue developing the company’s AI infrastructure.

Heckler said SpendRule views traditional invoice auditors as competitors, naming companies such as SpendMend and GHX. Akintolayo added that a key difference is SpendRule’s focus on purchase services — the kinds of hospital purchases that don’t come with barcodes.

“Our goal is to build a more resilient hospital system,” Akintolayo said. “That’s our vision. To protect the bottom line of everyone by connecting their data and helping them make better decisions.”