Your Editor has returned after a fair amount of travel away from the desk. She was also sidelined to attend to some health issues, including a nasty cold that hasn’t quite taken its claws out of her head and lungs yet, and some technical difficulties on our publishing site.

The big news today is CVS’ split that undoes their ‘big bang’ of 2018. Unusually, there’s a lot of early Q4 investment at the Series A level and a bit of M&A action. In AI World, Anthropic finally filed for their IPO while OpenAI is asking for more bridge money. Here’s our selective roundup:

• Today’s bombshell was that CVS is splitting its lines of business into two publicly traded companies by H1 2028. Aetna and Caremark, the CVS pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), Oak Street Health, home health firm Signify Health and CVS’ specialty drug business will be in one company as CVS Health, and their roughly 9,000 retail stores and pharmacies, plus the mail order pharmacy, walk-in clinics and Health100 technology services. will constitute CVS Pharmacy. According to CNBC, CVS Health will be run by current CEO David Joyner, while CVS Pharmacy will be led by Prem Shah, group president of CVS Health. The company’s market value is about $117 billion. Current shareholders will receive shares in both companies. Healthcare Dive
  • Both companies have done well in recent quarters. The Merlo/Bertolini vision of an integrated healthcare giant lasted exactly ten years. 
• In late October, Vera Health raised $28.5 million in Series A funding to expand its evidence-based AI clinical search platform. It’s a word-of-mouth story, as it’s accumulated a claimed 800,000 clinicians using it worldwide from a few thousand a year ago. It’s now used across 190 countries, including approximately 1 in 4 physicians in Spain and Italy and 1 in 7 in France. Vera managed to do this with just 12 employees. The Series A was led by Threshold Ventures, with participation from Mantis VC and SV Angel. Existing investors Y Combinator and Gradient tripled down, bringing the company’s total funding to $32 million. Website/release, HIStalk, PYMNTS.com
• Tegria acquired CloudWave for an undisclosed amount. Tegria is a global healthcare consulting and IT services company that partners with provider and payer organizations. CloudWave is a full-service cybersecurity and cloud services provider for community hospitals and health systems. Release
• Administrative automation platform ClarityCare raised $16.5 million in a Series A funding, led by global venture capital firm Headline. New investors were Arthur Ventures and FJ Labs and existing investors were Maverick, firstminute, Top Harvest Capital, and Transpose Platform for a total funding of $20 million. According to their very flashy website, they run AI agents inside health plans, payers and TPAs to automate the administrative and clinical work needed to run cost containment operations. Spurring the funding is the CMS Rule CMS-0057-F which mandates a prior authorization decision timeframe of 72 hours for expedited requests, and seven days for standard requests.  Website/release, MedCityNews
• Midstream Health garnered $20 million in a Series A for its autonomous financial operations platform. This round was led by Valtruis, and included participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Foundry and CommonSpirit Ventures. Its network covers over 250 hospitals nationwide and emphasizes recovery via monitoring of contracts, claims, rebates, other supply chain areas,  and payments. Release, MedCityNews
• And closing today’s roundup, Anthropic PBC, which markets its AI tools as Claude, finally filed its SEC Form S-1 to go public on the Nasdaq, trading under ANT. No target date is given, nor pricing and number of shares. The company is presently closely held by founders Dario and Daniela Amodei. Anthropic’s revenue was $16.3 billion for the first six months of 2026, up 1,300% from $1.2 billion during the same period last year. It all looks lovely except that on-balance sheet liabilites total around $117.5 billion (balanced against roughly $112 billion in cash prior to its IPO). Bloomberg Tax and off balance sheet and long-term compute commitments of $895.4 billion. CNBC, Mobihealthnews
  • Given all this, the Anthropic IPO may not happen until 2027.
  • For instance, OpenAI filed initial SEC forms in June, but is delaying their IPO to sometime in 2027. They are currently seeking a bridge raise of $10 to $20 billion this year in advance of the IPO. FT.