Why we build vertical software for Medicaid-funded operators

September 7, 2026 · Prasar Group · 5 min read

Most of the operators we work with have between five and fifty employees. They run vans, or they run a day program in a converted storefront. They are paid, mostly, by a state Medicaid program through a broker or a managed care plan. And almost none of them have software that was written for the way they actually work.

That gap is the whole reason Prasar Group exists in its current form. We are a venture studio, which means we conceive, build, and operate our own companies rather than investing in other people's. Two of those companies, ZeitRide for non-emergency medical transportation and Adult Day Genie for adult day care centers, serve the same kind of customer from two different directions. A third, Dial Raven, gives those same operators, and thousands of other small businesses, the phone system and messaging inbox that the rest of their day runs on. This piece is about why we chose that customer.

The operators nobody builds for

Enterprise healthcare software is built for hospitals and health systems. Consumer software is built for patients. In between sits a large, fragmented layer of small businesses that deliver Medicaid-funded services every day: transportation providers, day programs, home care agencies, behavioral health practices. They are too small for enterprise vendors to sell to profitably and too specialized for horizontal tools to fit.

So they improvise. A trip schedule lives in a spreadsheet. Attendance lives on a paper sign-in sheet. Billing is a monthly ordeal of reconstructing what happened from three different sources. The work gets done, but the record of the work is fragile, and in a Medicaid-funded business the record is the revenue.

Why vertical, not horizontal

A horizontal tool, a generic scheduler or a generic form builder, asks the operator to translate their world into the tool's vocabulary. A vertical tool already speaks it. When a dispatcher opens ZeitRide, the objects on the screen are trips, legs, brokers, and vehicles, because those are the objects in their day. When a center director opens Adult Day Genie, the first screen is who is in the building right now, because that is the question they get asked.

Vertical software also lets us encode the rules that matter in a given setting. A completed NEMT trip needs actual pickup and drop-off times, a location, and often a signature before a broker will pay for it. An adult day attendance record needs a name, a date, and start and end times, and a correction should never silently overwrite the original entry. Those rules are not configuration options in our products. They are the product.

Why we operate what we build

Every Prasar Group company is run by the same team that writes its code. There is no hand-off to a separate operating company. That sounds like an organizational detail, but it changes what gets built.

• Support tickets become roadmap. When a dispatcher writes in at 6 AM because a driver called out, the person reading the ticket is the person who can change the reassignment flow that week.
• Pricing stays honest. We publish our prices because we would want to see them if we were the buyer. ZeitRide is $49 per active vehicle per month. Adult Day Genie's attendance plan is $99 per month. Dial Raven starts at $14.99 per user per month. There is no quote-request form between an operator and the number.
• Shared infrastructure compounds. Engineering, applied AI, billing integrations, and go-to-market are shared across the portfolio. A lesson learned about Medicaid claim validation in one product shows up in the other.

What comes next

The same pattern, small operators, Medicaid-funded, badly served, repeats across more categories than we can build for at once. We will keep choosing the ones where the record of service is the thing that gets an operator paid, because that is where a well-built system does the most good for the smallest business.

If you run one of those businesses and want to see how we think about it, the product sites are the best place to start: ZeitRide for NEMT, Adult Day Genie for day centers, and Dial Raven for the phones.