H1, a New York healthcare data company, said on 9 September 2026 that it had acquired Defacto Health, a startup that tracks which doctors and other providers take part in which health insurance plans. It is H1's third acquisition in about two years.
The value of the deal was not disclosed. H1 executives told Fierce Healthcare that it was paid in a mix of cash and stock.
Defacto will operate as part of H1, and its co-founders, Ron Urwongse and Tarun J. Theogaraj, are joining the company to continue leading the business. The two companies had already worked together for years: H1 licensed the data layer that Defacto supplies, and the purchase brings it in-house, HIT Consultant reported.
What Defacto Health built
Defacto collects and cleans data from payer networks, provider directories, machine-readable files published by insurers and practice demographics. Health plans use it to check whether their provider directories are accurate, to find clusters of errors and to compare their networks against others. It can also verify in near real time whether a provider accepts a commercial, Medicare Advantage or Medicaid plan.
According to Pulse 2.0, the company has worked with payers on government compliance requirements and with health technology firms that need payer and provider data, and its datasets have been used by hundreds of payers and cover millions of providers.
The reports did not give Defacto's founding year, location, headcount or any outside funding.
“We have worked with Defacto and know firsthand the value of its data and the expertise of its team.”
The founders
Both co-founders previously worked at CAQH on its provider-data products. Urwongse managed provider-data and interoperability solutions there. Theogaraj managed provider-data products and later led product work on CAQH's main provider-data platform.
"We built Defacto to make provider network information more accurate, accessible, and useful," Urwongse said in the announcement, as quoted by Pulse 2.0.
Why H1 is buying
H1 was founded in 2017 and began by helping pharmaceutical companies pick clinical trial sites. Its core product, Doctor Graph, maps physicians' expertise, publications, referral patterns and institutional ties. The company says its data is used by nine of the ten largest US health plans and 85% of the top 20 drug makers.
Directory accuracy has been a recurring problem for that business. H1 leadership told HIT Consultant that errors in directory and network data had historically accounted for roughly half of H1's customer support tickets. Defacto's directory auditing, error isolation and network benchmarking tools will be built into H1's platform and its datasets added to Doctor Graph.
Ariel Katz, H1's co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement: "We have worked with Defacto and know firsthand the value of its data and the expertise of its team." He also pointed to the pressure on health plans to keep provider directories accurate.
H1 sells its platform to health plans, hospitals and health systems, digital health companies, life sciences firms, government agencies and employers, according to HLTH. Its software uses healthcare data and AI agents to help those customers find and match physicians for clinical trials, commercial work, patient care and referrals. Pulse 2.0 reported that H1 plans to combine Defacto's network expertise with its own data and AI to build a more connected view of providers and the networks they belong to. Katz said "Health plans are under continued pressure to maintain accurate provider directories", the problem Defacto was set up to address. Pulse 2.0 added that Defacto's datasets have reached tens of millions of patients.
H1's run of acquisitions
The deal follows H1's purchase of provider directory and care navigation platform Ribbon Health in January 2025 and of Veda Data Solutions, which uses AI to manage provider data, about five months later, according to HLTH.
H1 raised a $100 million Series C in 2021, extended to $123 million in 2022 at a reported valuation of $773 million, and secured a further $40 million earlier in 2026, HLTH reported.
