Editor’s note: Startland News editors selected 10 high-growth, scaling Kansas City companies to spotlight for its annual Startups to Watch project. Now in its 11th year, this feature recognizes founders and startups that editors believe will make some of the biggest, most compelling news in the coming 12 months. The following is one of 2026’s picks.
Click here to view the full list of Startups to Watch and see how the companies (including this one) were selected.
Since launching CarePilot, Joseph Tutera has come to realize that healthcare providers by default become some of the highest paid data entry clerks in the United States, he shared.
“There’s absolutely no reason why that has to be the case,” continued the founder and CEO of the Kansas City-built AI startup. “It’s not a law of physics that they have to spend all day inside their medical records.”
Started in 2023 while Tutera was a student at Texas Christian University, CarePilot is an ambient AI tool that listens to the healthcare provider’s conversation with the patient and does about 90 percent of the administrative work for them, including notetaking, coding, and order entry.
“CarePilot is a technology that lets you go be a doctor,” he explained, quoting the company’s pitch to providers. “In the United States, the average healthcare provider spends eight hours a day in their clinic, and four hours of their day is spent taking care of patients. The other four hours of their day is spent on any number of tedious administrative tasks necessary for the continuation of care, for the healthcare payer, for compliance, legal requirements, etc.”
“So for every one minute that you spend performing health care,” he added, “you have to spend one minute doing the administrative work that goes into that health care and that is a huge problem. And it’s the reason why there are 100 times more administrators in the United States than there are for than there are doctors.”
Elevator pitch: CarePilot lets doctors focus on patients. We handle the charting, coding, billing, orders and inbox so providers can focus on what really matters.
- Founders: Joseph Tutera, Adam Blake, Samar Acharya, Tanner Helton, John O’Hearn
- Headquarters: Kansas City
- Founding year: 2023
- Current employee count: 13
- Funding amount raised to date: $3.68 million
- Noteworthy investors: Mucker Capital, KC Rise
CarePilot allows every practice to have the resources of a more wealthy operation, Tutera noted.
“If you’re already a wealthy practice, you have somebody that’s paid $50 an hour that follows you around with laptop all day,” he explained. “Not everybody can pay $10,000 or $5,000 a month for a medical student to follow them around, but everybody could pay a couple $100 a month to have an AI that does the same thing. So that’s the goal.”
CarePilots team members Kyle Rall, Joseph Tutera, Tanner Helton, and Audrey Pino in their new Crossroads office; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News
2025 proved to be a big year for the healthcare tech startup as it raised a $2.5 million funding round in the summer; hit 100 billion in OpenAPI tokens processed — the building blocks of text for OpenAI models — and earned a shoutout at OpenAI DevDay in October for being in the top 75 for overall utilization out of about four million developers on the OpenAI platform; launched two new products (coding and order entry); and debuted a partnership with Affineon Health to offer practices clinical inbox management tools.
“The partnership with this company and CarePilot InboxAssist involves an AI agent that will look at your labs and look at your prescription renewal inbox items in real time as they come in automatically,” he continued. “It flag normals, flag abnormals, does some calcs for you, and ultimately reduces your Inbox by somewhere between 30 to 80 percent depending on how you do your inbox work. It’s really, really cool.”
ICYMI: Summer funding pushes CarePilot to team hires, AI accolades, healthtech product launch
Despite all the CarePilot team has accomplished so far, Tutera said, they’re just getting started at meeting the startup’s potential.
“We are about 1 percent of the way to where I want to be,” he noted. “Ultimately, I think that the company that I’ve started is a really good mechanism to make a material impact on the way that healthcare providers actually practice medicine.”
Tutera also teased that the momentum will continue in 2026 with hiring across all departments and the launch of CarePilot CoPilot early in the year. That product is forecast to help providers retrieve information with fewer clicks.
“Expect our footprint in Kansas City to grow,” he shared. “Expect our product line to grow. Expect more leverage for each provider in our client base. They’re going to be able to do more with exactly what they have now. We have some pretty cool stuff coming.”
10 Kansas City Startups to Watch in 2026
- Authentiya puts ethical AI to the test as students embrace controversial classroom tech
- Cyphra Autonomy pairs robotics with heavy labor (and a light lift for job site users)
- dScribe tracks early momentum with West Coast-Midwest funding combinator
- The Good Game connects young athletes with on-demand sports experts
- LAN Party gains steam with nostalgia as a hook, gaming enterprise potential as the real play
- LODAS Markets unlocks liquidity as timing pays off for founder’s investment
- Resonus wants local government to hear you — not just the loudest voices
- Roz uncovers dynamic momentum amid audit of its own shifting opportunities
- Sova Dating builds emotional matches with vibes, logistics and an unexpected viral moment
