The operator they kept promoting
In August 2024, Carbon Health did something venture-backed health tech almost never does. It promoted its COO. No celebrity hire from a payer. No ex-Big Tech parachute. Just Kerem Ozkay, the guy who had been quietly running the trains for five years, given the keys.
Founder Eren Bali wrote the announcement on social. He was stepping back to focus on Udemy, the online learning company he had co-founded and built into a public stock. Carbon's chief operating officer would take over. Bali would stay on as executive chairman. It was the cleanest succession a fast-moving healthcare company could plausibly run.
Six months later Ozkay filed for Chapter 11 in Texas. Carbon Health, which had raised in the neighborhood of $986 million, was carrying more than $100 million in debt. Future Solutions Investments committed up to $19.5 million in debtor-in-possession financing to keep the clinic lights on while the company restructured and ran a sale process. Ozkay framed it the way operators do: a decisive action, not a defeat.
"The decisive actions we are taking today will strengthen our financial foundation and better position Carbon Health to advance our mission of making high-quality healthcare accessible to everyone," he said in the announcement.
The Carbon Health scoreboard
An aerospace degree he never flew
Ozkay studied aerospace engineering at the University of Arizona between 2002 and 2007. The degree is a tell. People who pick aerospace at eighteen tend to like systems with hard constraints and unforgiving feedback loops. Wings work or they don't. Schedules hold or patients walk.
He never went to work on rockets. Instead he joined Z Gallerie, the home furnishings retailer, as an Internet Marketing Specialist in 2008. He stayed for eleven years. That detail matters. In a tech ecosystem that fetishizes the two-year stint, Ozkay stitched together a career arc out of the same employer's reorgs: eCommerce and Marketing Analyst, Director of Marketing and Customer Strategy, VP of Marketing Strategy, VP of Marketing and Head of eCommerce.
Each title was a step further from the brand creative and closer to the spreadsheet. By the end of his Z Gallerie run, he was the person responsible for whether furniture moved off the shelves and through the warehouse. That is healthcare operations with sofas instead of stethoscopes.
In 2019 he jumped to Carbon Health, then a young clinic chain pitching itself as the technology-forward version of in-person primary care. The pandemic hit a year later. Carbon raised money fast, scaled vaccination programs across the United States, and built a homegrown electronic health record system on the assumption that nothing on the market actually fit how a modern clinic should run.
How he actually runs the place
Restructured scheduling, staff hated it
On the Out of Pocket podcast, Ozkay said Carbon rebuilt its scheduling platform to optimize availability. He admitted the staff hated the change and defended it anyway. The patients showed up. The throughput improved. That is the trade he is willing to make.
"Run toward all the white space"
His phrase for how Carbon thinks about patient acquisition. Rather than fighting incumbents on their turf, the team chased gaps in coverage, gaps in hours, gaps in specialties. The same furniture-funnel logic, rewritten for clinic foot traffic.
Persuasion has limits
"I can't convince doctors to do anything they don't wanna do." A blunt admission from an operator running a clinical workforce. The implication: build tooling that providers reach for voluntarily, not mandates they resent.
Career, compressed
Graduates from the University of Arizona with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. Never works on aircraft.
Joins Z Gallerie as Internet Marketing Specialist. Begins an eleven-year climb without changing companies.
Promoted to Director of Marketing and Customer Strategy. The role tilts from creative to operational.
Promoted to VP of Marketing and Head of eCommerce, now responsible for both the funnel and the fulfillment.
Leaves Z Gallerie for Carbon Health, joining a young clinic chain pitching itself as healthcare reimagined.
Carbon scales fast through the pandemic, building its own EHR and running vaccination programs across the country.
Named CEO of Carbon Health on August 20. Founder Eren Bali becomes executive chairman.
Files Chapter 11 in Texas. Secures $19.5M debtor-in-possession financing. Begins restructuring and sale process.
What a turnaround CEO actually does
Most CEO profiles get written at the launch party. Ozkay got his at a different kind of inflection. By the time he took the title, the easy money had drained out of digital health. The pandemic tailwinds that had pushed Carbon to a hundred-plus clinics were gone. Capital markets had turned hostile to anything in healthcare that did not have a clean path to profitability. The board needed someone who knew which clinics were carrying their weight and which were not.
That was Ozkay. As COO he had owned the operating reality. He knew the unit economics, the staffing ratios, the lease terms, the no-show rates. The promotion was less coronation than confirmation. The board did not need to interview him. They already had the data.
The restructuring filed in early 2025 reads like the work of someone who had already mapped the spreadsheet. A pre-arranged Chapter 11 with committed DIP financing is not a panic. It is the controlled demolition that follows a year of negotiation. Carbon kept the clinics open. Patients kept their appointments. Vendors got a path. That is the boring, useful work of an operator-CEO.
Carbon's core bet remains the same one Ozkay has been operating against since 2019. A hybrid model that braids together in-person urgent care, primary care, and a virtual layer, all running on a single homegrown EHR. The pitch is that the integrated stack is the moat. The Chapter 11 will test whether it is also the business.
Chapter 11, 2025
$100M+ in debt at filing.
$19.5M in DIP financing from Future Solutions Investments.
Goal: sale and refit of the clinic footprint while operations continue uninterrupted.
The small print
San Rafael commuter
Lives in San Rafael, California, while Carbon Health is headquartered in Sunnyvale. That is a Bay Bridge plus a fair stretch of 101 between bed and desk.
Aerospace to sofas to scalpels
The full sequence: rockets degree, eleven years of e-commerce funnel optimization, then primary care. Each pivot looks unrelated. Each is really the same job done in a different room.
Multiple hats at Carbon
Public org charts list him under several titles over time, including SVP Marketing and COO. The takeaway: he has touched most of the company at least once.
Bali stayed
The founder did not vanish. Eren Bali kept the executive chairman seat. The transition is collegial by design.
Podcast over panel
His most candid appearances tend to come on operator podcasts like Out of Pocket rather than glossier stages. He talks throughput, not vision.
Carbon-trained
His professional center of gravity sits inside Carbon Health rather than the wider Bay Area founder circuit. He is, in the operator's sense, a company man.