Editor’s Note: This story is the first in a series of three stories that explain a new startup in Iowa.
Zach Veigulis, the co-founder and chief AI officer of Claimable, calls his startup the Turbo Tax for insurance claims.
Users upload medical documents, answer a questionnaire and within minutes have an AI-generated letter to rebut a rejected insurance claim. The platform leverages custom-built AI to analyze clinical research, policy details, appeals data and patients’ unique medical stories to generate and submit customized appeals. It costs $39.95; with shipping costs it’s about $50 “all in,” Veigulis said.
The company has supported over 1,000 appeals since it started, he said.
“Appeals need to be grounded in medical evidence,” Veigulis, from West Des Moines, said. “The best ones have supporting laws that are protective and then ours even include cases where the insurer has been beaten in the past to show a pattern of precedent, to really tie the story all together.”
There are 5 billion medical claims in the U.S. every year, said Veigulis, quoting federal figures published in the Wall Street Journal. Of those, 17% are denied, or about 850 million per year, with only 1.7 million a year appealing, Veigulis said.
“So said another way, 99.9% of … medical claims are never appealed,” he said. The ones that are appealed have a 52% chance of winning, he said. With Claimable, the success rate hovers around 80%, he said.
Veigulis said patients with chronic disease or those using high-cost specialty medicine can face 50% denial rates in those subspecialities.
“So it’s a massive problem,” he said. “We’re unapologetically on the side of the patient and the provider.”
Claimable has attracted local and national attention since it launched its product in October 2024. In 2024, it won the Technology Association of Iowa’s Prometheus Award for being the startup technology company of the year. In 2025, it was on Fast Company’s list of World Changing Ideas.
The company has 14 employees, with the entire technology team based in the Midwest, Veigulis said.
The issue of rejected claims has also attracted national attention since December 2024 when Luigi Mangione was accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan. Mangione has pleaded not guilty. Thompson’s death spurred comments across the country highlighting frustration over denied claims.
“And then all the sudden everybody’s talking about it,” Veigulis said. “Everybody’s like, ‘I was affected by that.’ … And then our phones [have] been ringing off the hook.”
The message he shares is: “Everybody has the right to appeal. There is hope here.”
Veigulis said the federal government regulates how insurers must respond to appeals, so “this isn’t AI versus AI.” He said insurers must appoint a board-certified specialty-matched physician to review the case.
Veigulis is formerly the chief data scientist at the Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Collaborative Healthcare Innovation based out of Palo Alto, Calif. He co-founded the company with Warris Bokhari, chief executive officer, a former physician turned health-tech operator and Alicia Graham, chief operating officer, who has led growth, product and design for over 15 years.
“What we’re doing is we’re expanding access to care,” he said. “And that’s the part that really motivates us.”
Claimable supports appeals for more than 70 treatments, focusing on GLP-1s for weight reduction and Type 2 diabetes, as well as commonly denied medications for autoimmune and migraine sufferers – conditions affecting nearly 65 million Americans, Veigulis said.
The company is launching asthma as a supported condition soon, he said. He also said the company is expanding into more medications and also services like diagnostic imaging and therapeutics, such as surgeries.
The product asks condition-specific questions created through user research and medical evidence to help craft its letter, Veigulis said. It also asks questions such as “describe how your worst symptoms feel.”
“What we’re really trying to do here is humanize the patient,” Veigulis said.
An untreated illness can impact marriages, relationships with families and the patient’s mental health, he said. “And so we expect that the person that’s reviewing this case with these details in it is going to make a favorable decision for these patients,” he said.
The AI-generated letter is sent to the user’s insurance company, but Claimable also copies relevant regulators and anyone else who could be influential in the decision, including the patient’s employer, he said.
“We’re taking your story, we are cleaning it up,” he said. “We’re turning it into a narrative. We’re keeping your tone. We are finding medical evidence that is supportive of the medication for the condition that you’re appealing for. We’re finding any applicable state or federal laws that are applicable for you. We are finding cases where the insurer has been beaten in the past that are in our database [or] we pulled from public sources, or that have been appealed through Claimable and we are building an appeal letter.”
Veigulis’s goal for the future of Claimable is to ensure that “everybody’s afforded the right to appeal in a very seamless way with a high probability of success.”