She moved in with her grandmother in her twenties. She came out the other side building Bold - a platform working to keep millions of people upright, strong, and in motion.
Amanda Rees runs Bold, a digital platform that writes personalized, science-based exercise programs for people the rest of the fitness industry forgot - older adults who want to stay strong, ease pain, and not fall down. The company partners with Medicare Advantage plans, which means a Bold program can land in someone's living room at no cost to them. That detail matters more than any feature list: the whole point is to remove the excuses, transportation, money, gym intimidation, between a person and the next ten years of their mobility.
The resume reads like two people stapled together. Rees earned a BSE in chemical and biological engineering from Princeton. She also trained in dance, attending intensives with Boston Ballet, and has spent more than a decade as a certified instructor in dance, yoga, indoor cycling, and tai chi. Her mother is a molecular biologist. So the through-line was set early: bodies and systems, movement and method, the studio and the lab.
Before any of this was a company, it was a renewable energy job. Rees managed the clean energy portfolio at The 11th Hour Project, a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation. She was a Dalai Lama Fellow. She did research stints at Stanford, Princeton, and UCLA. On paper she was headed toward climate and policy. Then her grandmother started falling.
Rees moved in. She spent most of her twenties as a caregiver, and when her grandmother, then in her 80s, began struggling with balance, Rees went looking for a program built for exactly this and found nothing usable. So she built one herself, out of the research, and taught it across the kitchen and living room. Her grandmother got steadier. Sharper, too. "It really radicalized how I thought about aging," Rees has said. She started teaching chair yoga and balance classes at Bay Area retirement communities, watching the same transformation repeat in other people's grandparents.
In 2018 she co-founded Bold with Hari Arul, who brought healthcare software and venture experience and who is also her life partner. The timing turned out to be uncomfortable and useful: the company found its footing just as the pandemic emptied gyms and sent everyone home. At-home, science-backed movement stopped being a nice idea and became the only option for a lot of people.
"Your health is another form of wealth."Amanda Rees
Most fitness technology chases the young and the already-fit. Bold pointed the other direction on purpose. The product starts with an assessment, then writes a routine tuned to a real person's strength, balance, mobility, and the chronic conditions they live with. Live classes, on-demand sessions, badges to keep people coming back. Behavioral science doing the quiet work of turning intention into a daily habit.
The business model is the clever part. By working through Medicare Advantage plans, Bold gets paid for an outcome the whole system wants anyway: fewer falls, fewer fractures, fewer expensive trips to the hospital. Prevention that pays for itself.
Rees frames it as closing the gap between healthspan and lifespan - the years you're alive versus the years you're actually well. Her stated ambition is to replace musculoskeletal decline with something closer to lifelong vitality.
The startup grind, she says, runs on the ability to absorb pressure and keep moving. Fitting, from someone who teaches strength for a living.
Fundraising and selling into healthcare means constant rejection. She names patience as the thing that gets you to the eventual yes.
Prioritize what people actually need over what you assume they need. The whole product philosophy in a sentence.
She walks her dog while listening to a podcast or taking a call, then makes coffee and clears high-priority tasks before the meetings begin.
"Some of my most productive hours happen in the evenings," she says, "when I find I can think clearly."
She loves Twyla Tharp's "Keep It Moving," and admires Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin for taking on ageism head-on.
"We want Bold to make it easy for anyone to take charge of their health as they age - at any age."
"It really radicalized how I thought about aging."
"I love my work, and I can spend a lot of time working without feeling burnt out."
"Some of my most productive hours happen in the evenings."
Profile compiled from public interviews and reporting, including STAT, Fitt Insider, Authority Magazine, The Gerontechnologist, Balance the Grind, and Bold's own announcements. Facts only - where the record was thin, the line was left out.