The Dallas-based fintech platform secured $2 million during its seed funding round last month.
In 2025, Joseph Akintolayo and co-founder Chris Heckler teamed up to launch an AI-powered healthcare platform dubbed Spendrule that would confirm in real time if invoices for services like laundry and general maintenance match vendor contract terms.
Akintolayo, an entrepreneur who launched his own fintech startup before exiting in 2024, and Heckler, who started Valify as a similar company to Spendrule before selling it to one of the largest healthcare systems in the country, HCA, both saw a need in the industry.
The gap is this: healthcare systems need to track spending. While the industry’s supply chain side is relatively well-tracked, the purchase services side—a $323 billion industry—is far less cohesive, according to Akintolayo.
“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. Contracts are in document management software; the ERP contains vendor information; and the accounts payable automation solution actually processes payments and invoices. These three pieces never speak to each other and are being used by totally different parties.”
To determine whether hospital systems are overpaying, Spendrule’s software analyzes original contracts and agreements between vendors and health organizations and matches them against invoices. According to industry estimates, purchased services account for almost half of health systems’ non-labor spend, yet much of that spend goes unmanaged.
The company says that, as a result, more than $32 billion in preventable overpayments occur annually. “We’ve built a technology that can digitize all these contracts, give them a brain, and turn them into a calculator,” Akintolayo said. “When an invoice comes in, we can compare it to the agreement to see if it is being adhered to. Instead of treating it like a file, we treat it like a living organism.”
Akintolayo said that in many cases, previous agreements and contracts are drafted years prior, only to never be revisited, despite numerous amendments potentially being tacked on over time. In short, vendors might not be overcharging intentionally. With so many unique contracts across multiple healthcare systems and no streamlined process to track them all, mistakes happen.
“This is an issue that the industry knows exists,” Akintolayo explained. “What’s happened is they’ve given up, and instead of proactively preventing the loss, they’ve shifted to audit companies. These companies come in, help claw back some money from overpayments, and charge you 20 percent to 40 percent of what they recover.”
In February, Spendrule raised $2 million in seed funding and now has 10 employees. Akintolayo said the startup plans to hire about 20 more over the next nine months. The company also aims to raise another round of funding soon.
Beyond overspending prevention, the platform wants to help also save time and administrative effort by minimizing the need for fund recovery. Akintolayo compares the process to hospitals—many of which are nonprofits—that process unnecessary tax returns and disburse funds, only to later recover a portion of those payments.
Looking ahead, Akintolayo sees the platform applying to industries beyond healthcare, such as real estate, construction, energy, and government services.
“Our whole thing is to help people save from all these arguments, lawsuits, negotiations, and help payments move faster and redirect the $32 billion worth of invoice mistakes that are tied to contracts towards patient care,” he said. “The reason we targeted healthcare initially is that there is so much opportunity to do good.”
