A music venue is a curious place to begin a software founder’s story. The room has to work before anyone applauds. The performers, the audience, the people at the door and the people behind the bar all have different jobs, yet a good evening depends on their cooperation. Long before Adam Sabloff was pitching investors, he was running a place where that cooperation happened at considerable volume.
TwiRoPa, in New Orleans, occupied a former industrial building with a name assembled from twine, rope and paper. Its bookings included Duran Duran, Ani DiFranco, Air and DJ Shadow. The address had already lived several lives before becoming an entertainment complex. Sabloff would eventually accumulate a similarly difficult-to-summarize résumé: entertainment, property development, technology and a company of his own.
The tempting version of such a career is a straight line drawn backward. His is more interesting with the corners left in. There was a closed venue. There were investors who needed years to come around. There was a luxury residential project whose customer-service habits travelled into software. A business biography can make all that sound inevitable. It required considerably more improvisation at the time.
The room before the boardroom
Sabloff grew up in Lake Success, on Long Island, and wanted to work in film. Summers took him to production-agency internships in Los Angeles; after Emory University, he worked in an agency mailroom. He liked making things and the people who made them. The attention surrounding the business had less appeal. Manhattan commercial real estate, through Newmark, became his next direction.
That change carried a useful resemblance. A building, like a production, requires specialists to agree on something they cannot create alone. Architects, designers, contractors and marketers bring different vocabularies to the same deadline. For a person interested in creating, the work can offer much of the pleasure of a film set, with a rather different approach to casting.
New Orleans introduced another turn. A property trip led to a warehouse purchase, and events and live music helped put the building to work. TwiRoPa became a business with several stages and dance floors. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina left the facility structurally unsound. Sabloff announced that it would not reopen.
Local music memories give the venue more texture than a founder’s résumé can. Its Live Room drew complaints about cavernous dimensions and difficult acoustics; its atmosphere and bookings also inspired affection. Interpol, the Decemberists, Blonde Redhead and Jurassic 5 were among the acts associated with its programming. It was a working room, with the arguments and loyalties that working rooms acquire.
Twi · Ro · Pa
Twine. Rope. Paper. Three former warehouse products became the name on a music venue.
A hotel lesson, carried into software
After New Orleans, Sabloff returned to property development with Midtown Equities. His responsibilities included development and marketing, as well as oversight of Midtown Technologies. He worked on the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Baltimore. Real estate, media, aviation and technology sat within the wider business, making the position a practical education in moving between industries without assuming they all operated alike.
The Baltimore work matters to his later story for a business reason that is easy to overlook: service. A residential development sells a place to live, but its continuing relationship with residents depends on what happens after the sale. The promise has to survive ordinary Tuesdays. Marble is attractive; someone answering the telephone is useful.
Sabloff attended the Ritz-Carlton training program and described himself, in a 2018 interview, as “a hospitality guy.” He took that background into VirtualHealth, the company he founded in 2012. His emphasis included user experience, clear pricing and customer support. He was prepared to absorb a cost to preserve a client relationship. That is a specific operating preference, with consequences for staffing and margins.
In software, service has an especially awkward assignment. Buyers may sign the contract, while quite different people use the product every day. A persuasive demonstration can satisfy the first group and still leave the second group puzzled. Sabloff’s hospitality background offers a useful way to read his approach: keep paying attention after the presentation ends.
“I’m a hospitality guy.”
Adam Sabloff · 2018
Three years before the cheque
Company-building also required patience with people who had yet to become customers or backers. In a 2016 account of the financing process, Sabloff described staying in contact with Edison Partners for three years before both sides agreed to work together. He treated early conversations as relationships worth maintaining through a period when agreement had not yet arrived.
The institutional investment was announced in May 2016. The announcement described capital for business and technology development. Those are unromantic uses of money, which is part of their appeal. A founder can spend a great deal of effort persuading someone to finance a business whose immediate requirements are more employees, more development and more capacity to do the work already promised.
Edison’s investment rationale put weight on the team as well as the product. Lenard Marcus described Sabloff as someone who stepped back to understand market needs and assembled a development team to meet them. The distinction matters. An idea becomes an operating company through the recruitment of people who can give it detail, challenge its assumptions and deliver it repeatedly.
In December 2017, Edison announced a further $7 million growth investment. Its account also described help with organizational design, messaging and sales strategy. Board director Kevin Hill was credited with strengthening the team and commercial relationships. Capital arrived with people attached, and Sabloff publicly acknowledged their contribution.
- 2012Sabloff founds VirtualHealth
- 2016Edison announces its initial investment
- 2017A further $7 million growth investment
- 2019Series B brings reported total funding above $25 million
- 2025Board and strategy role at Elligint Health announced
When the numbers caught up
The outside recognition came with a particularly legible number. VirtualHealth placed 39th on Deloitte’s 2018 Technology Fast 500, with reported revenue growth of 3,336 percent over the ranking’s measurement period. Sabloff was listed as CEO. A percentage that size deserves its dates attached: it describes a past interval, rather than a permanent speed at which a company can be expected to travel.
The December 2018 announcement associated the ranking with customer wins and also recorded recognition as a workplace. Growth creates two audiences for a founder’s promises: customers expecting delivery and employees responsible for producing it. Recruiting enough people is one problem. Giving them a company in which they can work well is another, and the second becomes harder to ignore as the first succeeds.
By June 2019, VirtualHealth had closed a Series B financing that brought its reported cumulative funding above $25 million. The exact size of that round was not disclosed in the announcement. Sabloff’s accompanying statement emphasized operating discipline and governance. For someone whose earlier business involved dance floors, the later vocabulary was decidedly boardroom-ready.
His fundraising recollections also contained an earlier rebuff: an investor found the business difficult to fit into established product categories. By the Series B, Sabloff said the company had attracted almost ten term sheets. He chose to continue with existing investors, including Edison. Familiarity had become an asset after years spent making the case.
The founder changes seats
On January 9, 2025, the announced combination of VirtualHealth and HealthEC introduced Elligint Health. Chris Caramanico was named CEO. Sabloff was described as VirtualHealth’s former CEO and an Elligint board member leading Strategy and Corporate Development. The distinction is important to the story: founding a company and continuing to hold its chief executive title are separate chapters.
A combination changes the scale of the questions. Product priorities, investment decisions and organizational relationships now have to accommodate another business. A strategy and corporate-development remit puts a founder close to those questions. The announcement established a new seat for Sabloff in that process, with a different title and a continuing connection to what he had built.
There is a pleasing continuity in the variety. His early work involved bringing people into a room. Development required bringing specialists onto a project. Software required bringing a team and investors into a company. The industries changed, and so did the practical demands. Cooperation remained expensive enough to deserve a founder’s attention.
A traditionalist at the table
One small preference interrupts all the talk of new products. Asked in 2016 about favourite New York restaurants, Sabloff chose established steakhouses, including Sparks and Peter Luger. He described himself as traditional about food. A person can advocate a new business model and still prefer dinner to arrive with a reassuringly familiar menu.
His father’s advice supplies the more durable refrain: “if you don’t quit, you’ll win.” Read against this career, perseverance allows room for changing direction. The film ambition gave way to other work. A venue closed. A software company took years to win backing. By 2025, its founder had moved into another role. The next chapter did not require the previous one to have gone according to plan.