Singapore’s Zeya Acquires ConnectLah to Build AI Infra for Regional Healthcare

Zeya Health, a Singapore-headquartered digital health infrastructure developer, acquired local clinic-automation start-up ConnectLah for an undisclosed sum. The early-stage consolidation will fully integrate ConnectLah’s WhatsApp-based automated communication and workflow technology to handle routine tasks with little human intervention.

The acquisition comes less than nine months after Zeya raised $575,000 in pre-seed funding from early-stage venture capital firm Antler and strategic angel investors. The January round was intended to support product development and expansion beyond Singapore.

For Zeya, the deal also brings an established technology product and a customer base that will let the company expand capabilities faster than developing them internally.

Acquiring ConnectLah lets Zeya scale its capabilities faster than building the same capabilities internally, said Jussi Salovaara, co-founder of its lead investor Antler.

It also highlights an accelerating trend of regional B2B healthtech consolidations. Early-stage enterprises are opting to acquire localised capabilities to shorten the long development cycles needed to bridge fragmentation across Southeast Asian electronic medical record (EMR) systems.

Operational Integration and System Interoperability

Founded in 2025, Zeya Health deploys specialised artificial intelligence “agents” designed to handle administrative overhead. The company’s architecture acts as an automated front desk that integrates directly with complex clinic backend networks, including EMR and hospital information management systems (HIMS).

The messy operational layer of healthcare administration, including custom practitioner availability matrices, timing rules, multi-tier insurance claims and referral windows, has historically relied heavily on manual co-ordination, phone calls and unstructured text threads. By absorbing ConnectLah, Zeya aims to eliminate this manual back-and-forth. ConnectLah’s tech stack currently automates patient reminders and rescheduling directly inside WhatsApp, which has reportedly reduced appointment no-shows by up to 40% for its clients.

After the transaction, ConnectLah founder Jules Pereira-Gomes will join Zeya Health as a strategic advisor to oversee workflow transitions and deploy integrated systems.

“ConnectLah brought AI into the communication channels that clinics and patients already use, proving the efficacy of automation within live patient workflows,” said Pereira-Gomes. “Bringing ConnectLah into Zeya allows us to extend that work to a much larger footprint of providers across the region.”

Capital-Efficient Regional Scaling

The acquisition comes amid rapid top-line growth for Zeya, which claims a 15-fold revenue increase over the past year, albeit off an early base. The company’s platform currently serves healthcare providers across Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia and Vietnam, alongside an active institutional hospital partnership in Cambodia. Zeya has set an explicit operational target to scale its infrastructure to support 1,000 healthcare providers by mid-2027.

The companies withheld financial details on ConnectLah’s standalone revenue, asset valuation or specific client counts. However, institutional backers indicate that the acquisition reflects an ongoing prioritisation of capital efficiency over internal capital expenditure.

Mitigating the APAC Healthcare Labour Deficit

The underlying macroeconomic driver for Zeya’s expansion is a pronounced regional workforce shortage across the Asia-Pacific healthcare sector. Hospitals and independent clinics are facing structural deficits in administrative and clinical personnel amid surging patient volumes. By shifting complex co-ordination logic—such as parsing patient requests and auto-matching them against internal clinic criteria—to localised AI networks, operators aim to reduce administrative burdens by as much as 50%.

For now, the combined entity will remain within the administrative infrastructure and patient-engagement layer of digital health.

Booking an appointment should be as simple as asking for one, said Agastya Samat, founder and chief executive officer of Zeya Health. The company is building the foundational infrastructure that allows AI systems to manage the intense operational complexity behind clinic schedules and booking rules. The objective is to automate the co-ordination burden while ensuring healthcare providers retain ultimate structural control over those rules