NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#PBM–After its $6.5 million raise from six prominent venture capital firms, Kanurra’s ambitions are broader than ever: it seeks to rewrite the rules of the PBM industry.
PBMs & The Health Cost Crisis
Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are infamous for making healthcare more expensive for Americans. PBMs are middlemen that manage prescription drug benefits for insurance companies, and traditionally, these PBMs have made money from hiking drug costs.
PBMs generate revenue from the spread. When a patient picks up a drug from a pharmacy, a PBM might only reimburse that pharmacy $20, then bill the patient’s employer or insurance plan $100, and pocket the difference. A report from the Federal Trade Commission found that some specialty generic drugs dispensed by PBM-affiliated pharmacies were marked up by over 1,000%. Over time, this translates to higher premiums, lower coverage, and less accessible healthcare for Americans.
Kanurra’s goal is to fix this problem.
A Flat Fee Alternative
Instead of siphoning revenue from American patients via the spread, Kanurra charges employers a flat administrative fee. Unlike traditional PBMs, Kanurra does not charge hidden, spread, or rebate-based fees, and passes drug costs through without adding a markup. The savings from this business model land in the pockets of American patients, as well as the employers that fund their employees’ health plans. For an employer paying for its employees’ GLP-1 costs, Kanurra could cut the cost of an Ozempic fill from $969 to $485, a difference that would scale to $58,080 a year for a 250-person group on Semaglutide alone.
A few PBMs also follow a pass-through model. But these PBMs are heavily focused on the higher end of the market, prioritizing enterprise partners over small and medium-sized businesses. Other than Kanurra, transparent PBMs will not partner with small level-funded groups at all, a member segment that comprises millions of Americans.
Kanurra’s founder, Semih Gultekin, says he seeks to “eliminate confusion and increase the accessibility of prescription medications.” Kanurra will partner with self and level-funded employers, with a specialty in small and medium-sized businesses. As opposed to legacy PBMs, Kanurra prides itself on its auditability. Kanurra’s AI-powered model will enable instant employer-side auditing of drug expenditures, which typically takes days or weeks with legacy PBMs.
Kanurra’s Story
Based in New York City, Kanurra’s backers include Necessary Ventures, Asylum Ventures, Daybreak Ventures, Virtue VC, Ford Street Ventures, and Browder Capital. Semih Gultekin founded the company in 2026. Gultekin plans to use the raised funds to expand Kanurra’s number of covered “lives,” while building out his company’s infrastructure to serve its partners and enrollees.
Kanurra’s flat fee describes how the company gets paid, while its pass-through pricing describes how drug costs move through the system. For its beneficiaries, plan sponsors pay the same amount that the pharmacy is reimbursed for the drug, without any markup, spread, or retained rebate.
A Columbia University graduate and healthtech expert, Gultekin has spent his career witnessing these gaps firsthand. With Kanurra, Gultekin says his vision is to “build the rails for personalized medicine and longevity.”
About Kanurra
Kanurra is a New York-based pharmacy benefit manager offering flat-fee, pass-through pricing to self-funded and level-funded employers, with a focus on small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in 2026 by Semih Gultekin, Kanurra has raised $6.5 million from Necessary Ventures, Asylum Ventures, Daybreak Ventures, Virtue VC, Ford Street Ventures, and Browder Capital. Learn more at kanurra.com
Contacts
Media Contact
Semih Gultekin
Founder & CEO
Kanurra
[email protected]
kanurra.com
