STARTUPS

The Fax Machine in 2026: The Story of Coral

By Thanushree

Ajay Shrihari grew up in Bengaluru chasing free pizza at hackathons.

It was a good way to spend a weekend. There was code, caffeine, and the occasional slice. He didn't know it yet, but those late nights were training him for something bigger. He became a machine-learning and robotics researcher, and his path led him to IIIT Hyderabad.

There, he met Aniket Mohanty, who worked on medical image processing.

Two engineers, two different obsessions. Neither of them was planning to start a company.

Then Ajay's brother had an accident.

A Different Kind of Wound

In New York, Ajay got an up-close look at the American healthcare system. He expected to find problems with the care. He found something else.

The doctors weren't the problem. The paperwork was.

Insurance approvals. Referrals. Patient forms. Page after page, form after form, and much of it still moved through fax machines.

In 2026.

Patients waited anywhere from 14 to 25 days. Not for treatment. For administration.

Ajay watched people wait in limbo, not because medicine couldn't help them, but because a document hadn't reached the right desk.

Zero Experience, Years of Practice

On paper, Ajay and Aniket were the last people who should have tried to fix this. They had zero healthcare experience.

But they did have something else. For years, they had worked as founding engineers at LimeChat, building automation tools. They knew how to take messy, manual, repetitive work and make it disappear.

So in 2024, they started Coral.

Meeting Clinics Where They Are

Their idea was simple.

Don't ask clinics to change how they work. Plug into what they already use.

No rip-and-replace. No months of retraining. No asking busy healthcare workers to learn yet another system.

Coral's AI reads handwritten fax forms. It handles insurance approvals and patient intake. What used to take weeks now takes under 5 minutes.

Starting Small, on Purpose

They didn't begin with big hospitals. They began with medical equipment suppliers, the unglamorous corner of healthcare with the heaviest paperwork.

It wasn't the flashy choice. It was the right one.

And the momentum came fast. Ajay even closed his very first customer on his way to the airport.

The Bet Pays Off

In 2026, Lightspeed and Z47 led a $12.5 million round in Coral.

It was a long way from chasing free pizza at hackathons in Bengaluru. But the instinct was the same: find the problem, build the thing, and show up.

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