He co-built America's largest outpatient mental health network. Then he started over - and named the new company after his daughter.
In July 2024, Danish Qureshi did the thing most operators only fantasize about. He left the leadership of a public company he helped build, and he started again from nothing.
The nothing became Zarminali Pediatrics, a company with an unusual name and a very specific grudge. American pediatric care is scattered across pediatricians, specialists, therapists, and urgent care clinics that rarely talk to each other. A parent becomes the switchboard, the scheduler, the records clerk, and the translator between all of it. Qureshi decided that arrangement was a bug, not a fact of life.
So he is building a single national pediatric group that does the coordinating instead of leaving it to exhausted families. Primary care, behavioral health, occupational and speech therapy, urgent care, virtual visits - stitched together under one brand, one record, one team. Think of it less as a clinic and more as a promise: care that follows the child from birth into adulthood without dropping the thread.
The ambition is not subtle. Qureshi wants Zarminali in roughly 30 states within three to five years, a footprint that would put a coordinated pediatric option within reach of about 90% of American families. In under two years he has already opened nearly 30 clinics across eight states and raised roughly $150M to do it. He is moving at the pace of someone who has scaled a healthcare company before and knows exactly how long the runway needs to be.
Because he has. This is the second act of a builder who keeps choosing the same kind of problem: enormous, fragmented, and personal.
Care needs to be equally accessible to everyone, not just reserved for folks who can afford a certain level of care.- Danish Qureshi
Qureshi did not arrive at healthcare through medicine. He arrived through spreadsheets, deal rooms, and a stubborn appetite for messy, systemic problems.
He started at Bain & Company, the training ground for people who like taking apart complicated machines to see how they run. From there he moved into healthcare-focused private equity at Nautic Partners, then jumped from analyzing companies to operating one - running the post-acute division of a wound-care business and scaling it into a network across 22 states.
In 2017 came the big one. Qureshi co-founded LifeStance Health and helped grow it into the country's largest outpatient mental health provider - roughly 7,000 clinicians, 550-plus centers, dozens of states, more than a million patients a year, and a spot on the Nasdaq. He served as Chief Growth Officer, then President and Chief Operating Officer. It was the kind of resume line most people spend a career trying to earn.
Then he left it to do the whole exhausting thing again - this time for kids.
After navigating the broken system with my daughter, I wanted to apply my experience transforming outpatient mental healthcare at LifeStance to improving pediatric care on a national scale.- Danish Qureshi, on why he started Zarminali
Most healthcare startups get named by a branding agency and a thesaurus. This one got named at a kitchen table. Zarminali carries the name of Qureshi's daughter, Zarmina - a small, permanent signature on a very large plan.
The company grew directly out of what his family lived through: the ordinary, grinding work of coordinating care for a child across a system that was never built to coordinate. Every specialist was another phone tree. Every appointment was another form. The people who are supposed to be caring for the child end up managing logistics instead.
Qureshi took that frustration and did what operators do with frustration. He turned it into a company thesis. If a seasoned healthcare executive found the pediatric maze this hard to navigate, what chance did anyone else have? That question is now the whole business.
It is also why he talks about mission the way other founders talk about margins. He has said plainly that financial returns alone will not sustain a founder through the hard parts - the mission has to. Naming the company after your daughter is one way to make sure you never forget the mission on a bad day.
Primary care, behavioral health, speech and occupational therapy, urgent care, and virtual visits under a single connected practice - so families stop being the glue.
Mostly organic, de novo clinic openings, with selective acquisitions of aligned practices. A patient, market-by-market build rather than a buying spree.
Modern software, telehealth, and asynchronous messaging aimed at cutting administrative drag - so the people delivering care are not buried in paperwork.
Qureshi joined the Slice of Healthcare podcast to walk through the founding of Zarminali, the seed round, and his plan to reach 30 states. It is the clearest look at how he thinks about scaling care.
Watch the interview"Danish Qureshi, Founder & CEO at Zarminali Health" - on the fragmented system, the personal spark, and a tech-driven fix for pediatric care.
"Mission must drive everything - financial returns alone won't sustain founder motivation."
"This is an area where many companies fail. To do growth and culture well, with a strong culture, is very difficult."
"The burden of coordinating appointments with specialists places a high level of stress on the family."
"Care needs to be equally accessible to everyone, not just reserved for folks who can afford a certain level of care."
The company's name is his daughter's name. Not a metaphor - an actual person named Zarmina.
He has now scaled two different corners of healthcare nationwide: adult mental health, and pediatric care. Same instinct, different age group.
Consulting to private equity to wound care to behavioral health to pediatrics. Every stop was a big, tangled system.
He openly models Zarminali's expansion on Oak Street Health - the value-based primary care roll-up - but pointed at kids.