Here is a fact about American healthcare that sounds like a paradox but isn't: there is a doctor shortage, and there are also a lot of doctors who can't get patients. The U.S. is on track for an 86,000-physician shortfall by 2036, and yet an independent nurse practitioner opening a solo telehealth practice can spend months invisible on Google while patients scroll past. The supply exists. The distribution is broken. Klarity Health is a bet that the broken part is the interesting part.
Klarity was founded in 2020 by Victor Zhou and Guorui Su, initially as a response to the mental-health surge of the pandemic. The early version was simple: connect people who needed care with providers who could deliver it over video. But the founders noticed something that turned a telehealth app into a marketplace. The scarce resource wasn't willingness to treat patients - it was the ability of an individual provider to be found, booked, and paid without drowning in overhead.
So Klarity built the other side of the market. It gave independent nurse practitioners, physician assistants and physicians the marketing, the listing, the scheduling, the billing and the compliance scaffolding they'd otherwise have to assemble themselves. In exchange, providers show up in a marketplace where patients browse them the way you'd browse anything else online: read the profile, check the specialty, book a slot, often within 24 hours.
The consumer pitch is refreshingly unglamorous. Visits start at $49 self-pay, or you can bring one of 400+ accepted insurance plans. There are more than 200 conditions on the menu - ADHD, anxiety, depression, insomnia, birth control, weight loss, primary care - across 500+ specialties. What Klarity is selling patients is not a breakthrough treatment. It's the absence of friction.
And friction, it turns out, is where telehealth actually leaks. Something like 61% of patients skip appointments because scheduling is a hassle; 77% research a doctor online before booking; 90% check reviews first. None of that is about clinical quality. It's about whether the front door opens. Klarity treated the front door as the product.
By 2023 the model had enough traction to attract a $10 million Series A led by Atypical Ventures, with earlier backing from Mucker Capital, UpHonest Capital, ZhenFund - and, fittingly for a company built on video visits, Zoom founder Eric Yuan. It's a modest raise by healthtech standards, which is part of the story: Klarity has facilitated more than 700,000 visits on roughly $10 million total. That ratio is the strategy, not an accident.
"For too long, independent practices have lacked the right growth tools while facing fierce competition from healthcare companies with big marketing budgets." — Victor Zhou, CEO & Co-Founder
The logical next move was to sell the machinery itself. In March 2025 Klarity launched Kiwi Health, packaging its provider playbook - listing optimization across 30+ clinical directories, SEO websites, scheduling, intake automation, a HIPAA-compliant patient portal - into a standalone SaaS for private practices. It's the classic marketplace maneuver: once you've built the tools to make your own supply side succeed, the tools become a product.
What makes Klarity worth watching isn't a single feature. It's the shape of the argument. Most healthtech pitches promise to fix the system by building a better clinic. Klarity's pitch is that you don't need a better clinic - you need the doctors who already exist to be findable, bookable and independent. Whether that scales into a durable business or gets squeezed by regulation on online prescribing is the open question. But the framing is clean, and the visit count is real.
