Dallas entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments led a $4 million seed round for Dallas-based SpendRule. The startup’s AI-powered platform matches health care systems’ contracts and invoices. Zeal Capital Partners, based in Washington, D.C., also participated in the round.
This round brings total funding to $6 million since its founding in 2025. The startup came out of stealth mode in February with a $2 million round led by Abundant Venture Partners and participation from iZeal Capital Partners and MemorialCare Innovation Fund.
SpendRule said the fresh funding will enable investments in product development and engineering, and expansion of its platform to other business sectors.
“Companies spend all this time negotiating contracts, but what’s the point if nobody checks whether they’re getting what they paid for? That’s the problem SpendRule is solving,” Cuban said in a statement announcing the funding.
SpendRule’s AI platform reviews each contract’s terms and checks every invoice against them. This helps organizations prevent overpayments, recover money they’re owed and ensure they get the terms they negotiated. Health care systems use SpendRule across $2.91 billion in annual spending on purchased services and nearly 2,200 vendors, the startup said.
“SpendRule turns agreements and policies into deterministic decision systems that actually run,” co-founder and co-CEO Joseph Akintolayo said in a statement. “They check what was billed, chase what’s missing and prove the result. With one instruction, ‘activate ongoing verification for this agreement,’ finance teams can put any contract under continuous enforcement.”
SpendRule is designed to track hospital-purchased services provided by third-party vendors.These services include medical waste management, laundry, IT management and cybersecurity.
“Nurses, techs and the people who keep the building running aren’t the cost problem. Paying more than you agreed to is,” SpendRule co-founder and co-CEO Chris Heckler said in a statement. “Every dollar lost to a billing mismatch is a dollar that didn’t go to care. This gives health systems another place to find margin without cutting patient care.”
Akintolayo and Heckler teamed up to launch SpendRule after realizing health care systems needed a better way to track spending. While the industry monitors its supply chain pretty well, that isn’t the case with purchased services, Akintolayo said.
“There’s too much unique information and no way to standardize it,” Akintolayo said. “There’s no way to put it all in one place, understand it and use it to make decisions.”
At health care systems, three separate software programs typically handle document management, vendor information and accounts payable automation, he said.
“These three pieces never speak to each other and are being used by totally different parties,” Akintolayo said.
To determine whether hospital systems are overpaying, SpendRule’s software analyzes original contracts and agreements between vendors and health organizations, and compares them with invoices. On its website, SpendRule says health care systems lose an estimated $32 billion annually to overpayment of purchased services.
Akintolayo and Heckler aren’t strangers to entrepreneurship.
In 2021, Akintolayo co-founded cloud-based fintech startup Deposits Inc. Ingo Payments acquired the Dallas startup in 2024.
Heckler co-founded Frisco-based Valify, which also helped health systems cut the cost of purchased services, in 2014. HCA Healthcare, one of the country’s largest health care systems, acquired Valify in 2020.
