The useful moment arrives before the dramatic one. Jon Bloom learned this in rooms built for urgency, then spent the next chapter of his career designing for the quieter interval when a warning can still become a small decision. His company began with a rough sketch for a connected insole. Its central interaction now takes about 20 seconds: stand on a mat, let the sensors do their work, step away. In a business culture addicted to adding, Bloom built his case around asking less.
He came to entrepreneurship with the instincts of an anesthesiologist. Bloom earned his medical degree at the University of Pittsburgh, completed residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2009, and later practiced and taught at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He also moved into industry as director of global medical affairs for Covidien's respiratory and monitoring business. The sequence gave him three views of the same machinery: the procedure, the institution, and the product.
What stayed with him was timing. During training and practice, he took part in operations that followed complications clinicians would rather catch much earlier. Acute medicine could be exact, skilled, and decisive. It could also begin after the most valuable days had already passed. Bloom wanted a wider unit of change than one procedure at a time. The ambition was not to make clinicians faster in the operating room. It was to give patients and care teams a useful signal before an operating room entered the story.
“I felt like I wanted to be able to drive bigger change.”Jon Bloom, on moving from one patient at a time to a system-level problem
01 / The roomA weekend full of strangers
In 2011, Bloom arrived at MIT Sloan. His résumé already had the solemn completeness of a medical career: degree, residency, faculty role, corporate responsibility. Business school was supposed to add another disciplined layer. Instead, a weekend rearranged the plan.
At MIT's first Hacking Medicine gathering, people from medicine, engineering, design, and business formed teams around problems worth tackling. Bloom did not walk in with his co-founders. The original Podimetrics group barely knew one another. David Linders, an MIT engineer and management student interested in medical devices, had been thinking about better ways to detect changes in the feet. Bloom immediately recognized the practical weight of the problem. By the second day, the team had sketched a proposal for a data-transmitting insole and finished among the event's winners.
The first idea was not the final object. That is part of its charm. Good founding stories are often edited backward until inevitability replaces uncertainty. Podimetrics kept the useful mess visible. A connected insole became a mat. An early prototype featured large sensors, a circuit board sticking out, and electrical tape doing what electrical tape has done for generations of engineers: holding tomorrow together until the proper enclosure arrives.
The team entered MIT's entrepreneurship competitions. They took a runner-up place and the audience-choice award in an elevator-pitch contest, then won the life sciences track at the launch finale. Each result made the idea a little less hypothetical. Bloom took a late-night entrepreneurship course he nicknamed “Get Stuff Done,” spent so much time at the Trust Center that he later joked he practically slept there, and absorbed a style of work that felt foreign after medicine.
02 / The conversionFrom “I” to “we”
Clinical training had taught Bloom how to carry individual responsibility inside a hierarchy. The Trust Center taught him to pass an unfinished idea across the table. Founders swapped introductions. Engineers helped with marketing. Business students wandered into product questions. Bill Aulet became a mentor and reference for Bloom's first financing. An MIT-organized trip to Silicon Valley produced an angel investor. The company gathered momentum through a network of people willing to make the next connection.
Bloom's neatest description of the transition was an “I to we” switch. It sounds like a soft lesson until one considers what Podimetrics had to become. A sensor can notice a pattern. It cannot create a complete care pathway. The company needed hardware, data systems, patient participation, clinical judgment, phone calls, payor relationships, research, and manufacturing to behave as one product. The “we” was not a slogan pinned over a kitchenette. It was the architecture.
“At the Trust Center, it's ‘we’ can do this. And that ‘I’ to ‘we’ switch was huge for me.”Jon Bloom, reflecting on MIT's entrepreneurial culture
By 2012, he had completed his first year of coursework and took a leave of absence to pursue Podimetrics. The choice was less a leap from certainty than an exchange of disciplines. The operating room offered protocols, teams, and immediate consequences. A startup offered hypotheses, fundraising, and weeks when the circuit board still showed. Bloom brought the habits of one world into the ambiguity of the other.
03 / The productMake the useful thing easy
The commercial mat has the visual confidence of an ordinary household object. A person steps on it much as they would a bathroom scale. Sensors measure changes, the readings travel to the cloud, and a care team reviews alerts. The cleverness is partly what the user does not have to do: aim a camera, interpret a chart, charge a wearable, or become an amateur analyst before breakfast.
Bloom has repeatedly returned to engagement as the test that matters. Early research found strong usage over a nine-month trial, a result he called especially exciting because new tools must survive the ordinary friction of a daily routine. Years later, when Podimetrics introduced SmartMat+, his explanation used the same logic. The newer platform measures temperature, weight, and postural stability, but it retains the short scan. Simplicity, he said, is what drives real engagement.
This is the transferable part of Bloom's story. Founders often treat user effort as an inexhaustible resource. In reality, attention has a budget, and people with the most to manage may have the least spare capacity for another elaborate ritual. Podimetrics' product proposition is therefore also a behavioral one: the system should carry more of the burden than the person.
Data alone is equally insufficient. A useful reading must reach someone who can distinguish a signal from noise and suggest a reasonable next step. In 2022, when a clinical trial raised the problem of false positives, Bloom's answer centered on nurses speaking with patients. The response captured the company's underlying structure. Software notices. Humans interpret. Care advances through the combination.
04 / The scaleThe years after the prototype
Podimetrics grew slowly enough to acquire a history. It entered the Rock Health accelerator and MIT's Beehive incubator in 2012, refined the taped prototype in Somerville, and spent years collecting evidence and building institutional partnerships. In 2022, the company announced a $45 million Series C led by D1 Capital Partners. Bloom said the funding would expand product development, research, and the nurse-support team.
Recognition followed operating results. Podimetrics appeared on the Inc. 5000 and ranked No. 128 on Deloitte's 2024 Technology Fast 500, which reported 891 percent growth over the relevant period. Fast Company included it among its 2024 World’s Most Innovative Companies. Awards are snapshots, useful mostly for what they reveal about the long stretch outside the frame: the trials, calls, enrollment work, manufacturing decisions, and institutional patience required to make a medical product routine.
Bloom has also moved into a public role for the industry. He serves on the boards of MIT Hacking Medicine and the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council, where he is listed as vice chair. In April 2025, he testified before the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs about biomedical innovation and the work Podimetrics had developed with the Veterans Health Administration. The setting had changed considerably from the hackathon. The argument had not: institutions should become better at acting earlier.
05 / The studentExpertise with the door left open
In a 2025 conversation about the changing role of physicians, Bloom argued that the doctor must now be a student “almost first and foremost.” Medical knowledge expands too quickly for the old image of omniscience to remain useful. Patients arrive with more information. Technology rearranges access. The physician becomes a partner, still responsible and trained, but willing to learn in public.
It is also a fair description of Bloom as an operator. Podimetrics began with one form factor and chose another. It began as a device and developed into a remote-care service. SmartMat+ widened the signals available from the same daily moment. None of those changes required abandoning the founding question. They required staying loyal to the problem instead of the first answer.
The company is now old enough that its origin belongs to another technological era. Cloud-connected objects were still novel. Digital health was a younger category. The original team could celebrate getting an exposed circuit board to behave. Yet the product lesson has aged well: measure something meaningful, fit the measurement into a life, and connect the result to a person who can act.
Bloom still returns to MIT and speaks with students. The detail feels appropriate. A founder who learned the “I to we” switch in those rooms now occupies the other side of the introduction. Somewhere, another disciplined career may be approaching an unruly weekend. Another half-formed prototype may be waiting for tape. The next company may begin as Podimetrics did, when the right people recognize a problem before they recognize one another.
Prevention rarely offers a theatrical ending. Its success is an event made unnecessary, a crisis edited out before anyone sees the final draft. Bloom's career has been built around that peculiar kind of evidence. The machine takes 20 seconds. The real product is time returned.