Camber has acquired Async Lambda, an automation firm with deep ABA roots, aiming at the manual work that sits between claim submission and payment.
Key Takeaways
- The slow part of billing is manual: Camber says much of the work of getting paid in ABA happens after a claim goes out, in follow-up steps repeated claim by claim.
- The acquisition adds workflow specialists: Camber has acquired Async Lambda, a firm that automated individual payer and portal tasks for ABA providers. Terms were not disclosed.
- The overlap already existed: Several Camber customers already used both companies, and those shared relationships gave the two a view of how their products worked side by side.
- Scrutiny raises the stakes for automation: With federal audits focused on documentation and a larger ABA code set arriving in January, how automation keeps pace with payer rules is a practical question for providers.
For most ABA providers, sending the claim is not the hard part. A session happens, a note is written, a code is attached, and the claim goes out. What follows is less visible: a status check on a payer portal, a rejection that turns on a modifier, a resubmission, a phone call, another portal. Camber, the New York revenue cycle company, described that stretch this week as the place where “a large share of the work of getting paid in ABA happens,” in “manual steps repeated across every claim.”
It is also the stretch Camber now intends to automate further. The company announced on September 22 that Async Lambda, an automation firm whose work is largely rooted in ABA, is joining Camber. The announcement frames the deal as the two companies joining forces, and Camber confirmed to Acuity that the transaction is an acquisition. Terms were not disclosed.
What Async Lambda Built for ABA Providers
Async Lambda’s website presents it as a technical partner to multi-location healthcare organizations, offering system integrations, data extraction and migration, data consolidation across sites, and custom automations, often beginning with a paid technical operations audit. The company says it has deep operational experience with ABA, dental, and intellectual and developmental disability providers, and that it is SOC 2 certified and HIPAA compliant.
The work is granular by design. Camber’s announcement says Async Lambda automated “the specific payer, portal, or recurring task until it worked reliably.” Its own site describes that work in general terms: replacing repetitive, error-prone manual tasks, from streamlining complex billing codes to automating routine patient communications, and connecting scheduling, billing, and care platforms so staff are not entering the same data twice. Robotic process automation, or RPA, is the category name for software that performs those clicks and keystrokes in place of a person.
The people behind the firm came to the work from different directions. Jess Ford describes herself on her personal website as a former chef and event planner who spent more than a decade in hospitality, including managing New York City restaurants, before becoming a tech founder at Async Lambda. Daniel Ford announced on LinkedIn earlier this year that he would co-present a session titled “Driving RCM Performance with RPA” at the Association of Professional Behavior Analysts conference with Jeanine Tanz and Jessica Cloutier of BlueSprig. Camber’s announcement credits the Async Lambda team with more than five years of hands-on ABA experience. At Camber, Daniel Ford is a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer and Jess Ford is a Mid-Market Account Manager.
In a joint statement, the two described what drew them to Camber. “At Async Lambda, our core focus is untangling the messy, behind-the-scenes processes in healthcare operations,” they said. “In Camber, we saw a team with the same focus on getting the details right, and an opportunity to bring our workflow automation into a broader revenue cycle platform. Together, we’re building the systems that eliminate billing errors and make specialty care payments easily executed and predictable.”
Why Camber Acquired an ABA Automation Firm
Camber’s account is that the two companies had been working on the same problem at different altitudes. Async Lambda went deep on individual workflows. Camber built what it describes as infrastructure across the broader revenue cycle, from claims creation and accounts receivable management to routing exceptions across a clinic’s book of business. Joining the two, the company says, connects workflow-level automation to that larger system.
“Async Lambda and Camber were working on the same problem from different angles,” said Jade Chan, a Co-Founder of Camber. “They went deep on automating individual workflows inside ABA billing. We built the platform to run that kind of work at scale. Bringing our teams together means we can automate much more of the work it takes for providers to get paid.”
Nathan Lee, also a Co-Founder, framed the deal around the people it brings in. “We’re excited to have Daniel and Jess joining our team at Camber to continue making impact for our clinic partners, and we value their deep subject matter expertise and experience in behavioral health-specific automation and infrastructure,” Lee said. Their ability to be thought partners with organizations of all sizes, particularly those with high complexity and scale, he added, “is a welcome addition to the team we’ve been building over the last six years.”
The companies also knew each other through their customers. According to the announcement, several Camber clients already worked with both firms, and those shared relationships let the two see how their products functioned side by side. Acuity has reported on how many separate steps sit between an ABA session and a payment: basic tasks such as benefits verification still run largely on phone calls, and one vendor says it runs more ABA prior authorizations than any single provider in the country.
Camber’s Growth in the Specialty Care Revenue Cycle Market
Acuity profiled Camber in March, when Lee described a platform built on predicting, before submission, whether a claim will be paid. In February 2025, Camber announced a $30 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from ACME and Craft, bringing its total funding to $50 million. K Ventures and Y Combinator also invested in the round. At the time, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Christophe Rimann said small clinics were shutting down over cash flow problems despite delivering high-quality care, and the company said it planned to expand into home health, long-term care, and substance use disorder treatment.
Camber’s company page cites more than $2.5 billion in claims data behind its systems and a first-pass paid rate above 95 percent, and the company says it has now handled more than 1.4 million claims, all figures Camber reports itself. It says it currently serves ABA and behavioral health more broadly, along with physical therapy, ENT, cardiology, and substance use disorder treatment. The Async Lambda announcement fits that trajectory. It calls ABA one of the clearest examples of why workflow expertise matters, and says Camber will keep connecting more of the work between a clinical service and payment, from eligibility and authorizations through claims submission, follow-up, and payment, as it expands across specialty care.
The company has also been active in Washington. Acuity reported this month that Camber paid McDermott+ $100,000 over roughly six months to lobby on Medicaid fraud and reimbursement, a registration that ended when the firm closed its lobbying practice on August 31.
Payer Compliance, Audit Risk, and ABA Billing Automation
The timing matters to providers because federal oversight of Medicaid ABA has turned squarely toward documentation. The HHS Office of Inspector General has published four state audits of Medicaid ABA payments and recommended more than $123 million in federal refunds, with findings that turned on session notes, billing codes that did not match documented activity, and missing credentials. In August, CMS released a toolkit for state agencies reporting that Medicaid and CHIP spending on ABA grew 421 percent between 2021 and 2025. Florida seated its own ABA Task Force in August after agency staff presented a $6.57 billion spending figure.
The rules themselves are also about to change. The 2027 CPT code set for adaptive behavior services grows from 10 codes to 14, adding six new codes, deleting both Category III codes, and splitting 97155. For a billing system, each change of that kind is a new set of rules to encode and, often, a new set of portal behaviors to learn. An automation built to satisfy one version of a payer’s requirements has to be revisited when the requirements move.
Automation and documentation address different parts of the problem. Billing automation is aimed at the mechanics of submission, status checks, and follow-up; the OIG findings, by contrast, turned largely on what the underlying clinical records showed. Camber’s own descriptions draw a similar line. Its company page describes a model in which automation handles volume while internal insurance experts handle payer escalations, documentation disputes, and other exceptions that require judgment.
What Comes Next for Camber and Async Lambda
Several practical details remain open. The announcement does not say whether Async Lambda will continue to operate under its own name, whether its standalone services, including technical audits and integrations for clients outside ABA, will continue, or how existing Async Lambda clients will be transitioned. Asked about those points, Paul McDonnell, Camber’s Head of Marketing, said the Async Lambda team has joined Camber and that terms are not being disclosed.
The combined team is at the Florida Association for Behavior Analysis conference in Orlando this week, where Daniel Ford is scheduled to join a CEU-eligible panel on using RPA to strengthen payer compliance and reduce audit risk. Camber’s announcement closes on a broader aim, describing a future in which providers spend less of their time on the mechanics of getting paid and more of that work is handled automatically.
