Erez
Cohen

The Playground Where It All Started

In 2020, Erez Cohen had just left Apple after five years running the Maps engineering team. The kind of role most engineers would hang onto - leading a product used by hundreds of millions of people, inside one of the most valuable companies on earth. He walked away from it.

Not long after, he was at a neighborhood playground in San Francisco, pushing his two-year-old on the swings. Next to him was Dr. Justin Schram, a physician who had spent years watching senior living communities lose the fight against outdated software. Thirty-year-old systems. Paper charts dressed up as PDFs. Technology that made caregivers slower, not faster.

By the time both kids were done swinging, Cohen and Schram had the outline of what would become August Health - an electronic health record platform purpose-built for senior living, designed with the kind of care usually reserved for consumer apps. The sort of product that a caregiver can actually learn on the job without a three-day training seminar.

Before August Health: A Career in Making Data Useful

Cohen's path to elder care is not as unlikely as it sounds. His whole career has been about taking complex data and making it accessible to the people who need it most.

He studied Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley - the discipline of making systems work better, of finding optimal decisions inside impossible constraints. He briefly pursued a PhD at Columbia before leaving academia for the startup world. At Palantir, he was a Forward Deployed Engineer: the role where you go into a client's office, learn their messiest data problem, and build something that solves it. His clients worked with credit derivatives and mortgage portfolios. He learned to make opaque datasets readable.

In 2013, Cohen co-founded Mapsense - a San Francisco startup that could take massive geospatial datasets and turn them into fast, interactive visualizations. Location data at scale, rendered in real time, in a browser. It was niche, technically sophisticated, and quietly essential for anyone working with geographic information at volume.

Apple came calling in September 2015. The acquisition price landed somewhere between $25 and $30 million. The Mapsense team - all twelve of them - packed up and headed to Cupertino.

Five Years Inside Apple Maps

Cohen's role at Apple wasn't a comfortable landing pad. He ran the Maps engineering team, responsible for the primary map creation tool - the infrastructure that turns raw geographic data into the maps that hundreds of millions of iPhone users depend on every day. It was large-scale, high-stakes product engineering, with consumer expectations baked in from day one.

What he absorbed there - perhaps more than any specific technical skill - was a standard. Consumer software sets a bar. People accept friction in enterprise tools because they have to, not because they want to. Cohen left Apple convinced that the same design thinking that made iPhone apps intuitive could be applied to the software that nurses and care coordinators used every day.

August Health: What the Numbers Say

August Health launched in 2020 and has been adopted by leading operators across the country - Priority Life Care, Leisure Care, Bickford Senior Living, Koelsch Communities, Westmont Living, Belmont Village, and Sonida Senior Living among them. The pitch is not just that the software is nicer to look at. The outcomes data is specific.

The platform covers move-ins, EHR, eMAR (electronic medication administration records), billing and payments, and real-time analytics dashboards. In August 2025, August Health secured a $29 million Series B led by Base10 Partners, with continued participation from General Catalyst and Matrix Partners, plus new strategic investors Equitage Ventures and the Senior Living Transformation Company. Total funding reached $44 million.

The Series B announcement came with a new product: August Intelligence - an AI-enabled care partner that works proactively across the platform to improve clinical, operational, and financial outcomes. It began rolling out to select operators in fall 2025.

Career Timeline

Why Senior Living, and Why Now

The senior living industry is not short of problems to solve. The U.S. is in the middle of a demographic wave - tens of millions of baby boomers aging into assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing. The operators running those communities have been making do with software that predates smartphones. The gap between what technology can do and what caregivers actually have is not a small one.

Cohen's framing is direct: this industry has been historically underserved by technology, and the consequences are not abstract. When software slows a caregiver down, residents get less attention. When data is siloed, risk doesn't surface until it becomes an incident. When billing is clunky, operators don't capture revenue they're owed. Every inefficiency lands somewhere human.

August Health's approach treats the caregiver as the primary user - not the administrator, not the operator, not the compliance officer. If the nurse doesn't want to use the software, none of the rest of it matters. That's a consumer-product design philosophy applied to enterprise healthcare, and it's the through-line from Mapsense to Apple Maps to August Health.

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