She holds a PhD in immunology from Cornell. She helped bring the world's first touch-screen glucose monitor to 15 countries. Now she's making sure your dialysis ride actually shows up.
There is a specific kind of person who leaves a decade of corporate healthcare, spends a year attending startup events they have no real business attending, and then founds a software company because they cannot stop thinking about a broken market. Jing Zhu is that person.
Before Duet existed, Zhu was a Senior Manager at Abbott Diabetes Care, shepherding the launch of the first touch-screen glucose monitor across 15 countries. She had a Cornell PhD in immunology and a Berkeley Executive MBA from the Haas School of Business. She had, by any reasonable measure, arrived somewhere. And then she walked away to spend a year learning what it meant to build.
She did not jump. She looked. She attended every startup event she could find, asked questions, listened to pitches, watched founders succeed and stumble, and let ideas ferment. The first idea was a carpooling app - Duet in its original form, connecting neighborhood commuters for spontaneous shared rides. The transportation problem grabbed her and did not let go.
But markets shift, and Zhu is nothing if not observant. The consumer carpooling space gave way to something more specific and, it turned out, far more urgent: the infrastructure crisis in non-emergency medical transportation. These are the vehicles - wheelchair vans, stretcher transports, ambulatory cars - that take Medicaid patients to dialysis, chemotherapy, and specialist appointments. The operators running these services were drowning in paperwork, missing reimbursements, and dispatching trips on clipboards and spreadsheets.
Duet became something else. Not a consumer app but a B2B platform - dispatching, scheduling, billing, fleet management, CRM, broker integration - built specifically for the people who make sure patients get where they need to go. Twelve employees. San Jose headquarters. A seed round closed in January 2023. And, quietly, real results in the field.
One operator had three months of unprocessed billing - claims sitting uncollected because the paperwork required for Medicaid reimbursement was incomplete. Duet's automated medical form generation cleared the backlog and brought reimbursement rates from 70% up to full Medicaid claims. Another customer grew from zero to 200 monthly trips in 90 days after entering a rural market. A third improved fleet utilization by 17% over seven months without adding a single vehicle.
These are not glamorous numbers. There is no viral growth curve. But in a market where a missed trip can mean a missed dialysis session, unglamorous precision is exactly the point.
The US non-emergency medical transportation market serves millions of Medicaid beneficiaries annually. Small and mid-size NEMT operators have historically operated with minimal software infrastructure, creating a structural gap between the complexity of Medicaid billing requirements and operators' actual administrative capacity.
Zhu has described the transportation and mobility market as going through "a phase of rapid disruption" - a characteristically measured way to describe what is, in practice, a wide-open field. The large players in logistics and ridesharing have not solved the compliance-heavy, relationship-driven world of Medicaid transportation. That gap is exactly where Duet operates.
She is also, notably, a Berkeley Founders' Pledge member - part of a cohort of Haas alumni who have committed to give back to the university's entrepreneurial network. The pledge is not incidental to how she runs Duet. Her advice to other founders reflects the same disposition: be open to no's without being swayed by them, do your market research with genuine curiosity, and treat a pivot as a last resort rather than a first instinct.
That last point is worth sitting with. In a startup culture that treats the pivot as proof of agility, Zhu's position is quietly contrarian. She knows that pivoting burns morale and resources - because she watched Duet evolve across years, not months. The product that exists now is different from what she launched in 2014, but it got there through calibration, not abandonment.
"The transportation or mobility market is going through a phase of rapid disruption right now."- Jing Zhu, Founder and CEO, Duet
Non-emergency medical transportation is, administratively, one of the most complex niches in healthcare logistics. Medicaid billing requires specific documentation. Brokers have their own integration requirements. Drivers need real-time routing. Dispatchers need visibility across a fleet. Duet consolidates all of it.
Live fleet visibility with optimized routing. Dispatchers manage multiple vehicles from one screen.
Automated trip assignment and scheduling with repeat-booking support for regular patients.
Medicaid-compliant billing, custom form generation, and reimbursement tracking. The feature that cleared three months of backlog for one customer.
API connections to clearinghouses and NEMT brokers. Trips flow in automatically; billing flows out.
Driver profiles, vehicle maintenance schedules, document tracking, and performance monitoring.
Client relationship management with trip history, utilization data, and operational analytics.
The Growth tier charges per Vehicle Revenue Hour - the unit of value an NEMT operator actually generates. When the operator earns, Duet earns. When the operator sits idle, so does Duet's meter.
"Pivoting can hurt team morale and drain your resources. It should be your last resort."
"Have a strong and open mind which is not easily swayed by the no's."
"It does take a while to find the right ingredients for a solution and calibrate it to solve your target problem."
"It's both the knowledge I learned which I am able to apply to running my own company, and the people I met who inspire me."
"I personally have benefited tremendously from the advice and help of Berkeley's alumni network."- Jing Zhu, Berkeley Founders' Pledge Member
Few NEMT software founders have a PhD. Fewer still pair it with a top-tier MBA. The combination shows up in how Zhu approaches customer research, product specification, and market entry.
Zhu's approach to building has a distinctly scientific patience to it. She spent a year observing the startup ecosystem before entering it. She spent years evolving Duet's product before committing to the NEMT niche. She is not chasing a news cycle or a venture narrative.
Her advice to founders is similarly unhurried: do the market research, understand the customer's actual constraints, and treat a pivot as a failure mode rather than a strategy. In practice, this has meant building customer success stories that are specific and operational - not growth charts, but real metrics that matter to small business operators.
She also carries the community instinct of someone who benefited from networks she did not build. The Berkeley Founders' Pledge is not just a commitment to the university - it is a signal about how she thinks about reciprocity and long-term relationship building in business.