Lily Vittayarukskul

The forecast nobody wanted to make

Lily Vittayarukskul runs Waterlily, a San Francisco company that does something quietly radical: it tells you, in plain numbers, how likely you are to need long-term care, roughly when, for how long, and what it will cost. Then it shows you how to pay for it - through insurance, an annuity, a life policy with a care rider, or your own savings. The engine behind that answer chews through more than 500 million data points to model a single human life.

Long-term care is the bill America forgot to budget for. Health insurance does not cover it. Medicare barely touches it. Families discover the gap at the worst possible moment, usually in a hospital corridor. Waterlily's bet is that the moment to learn this is years earlier, at a kitchen table, with a plan. The platform is now used by hundreds of financial advisors and has been adopted by four of the five largest carriers in the category, along with a roster of Fortune 100, 500 and 1,000 companies.

In 2026 she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social impact. Waterlily has raised close to $10 million, with a roughly $7 million seed round led by Brewer Lane Ventures and strategic checks from the insurance heavyweights themselves - Genworth, Nationwide and Edward Jones Ventures. When the incumbents of an industry write checks to the startup pointed at their own product, something is working.

From the Jet Propulsion Lab to the kitchen table

Start with the strange specific: she was taking college classes at 14. By 16 she was interning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on track to design things that leave the atmosphere. She is a daughter of immigrants, and the math of her childhood ran in two directions at once - high school during the day, college courses at night.

Then her aunt was diagnosed with terminal-stage colon cancer. The aunt was a cornerstone of the family, one of its breadwinners, and the diagnosis came with something the family never saw coming: nearly three years of daily caregiving and a stack of bills that health insurance simply refused to pay. They nearly bankrupted themselves. The strain did not end with the grief - it fractured the family so badly that one entire branch stopped speaking to the rest for over a decade.

That is the detail that explains everything else. Lily did not pivot from aerospace to healthcare because of a market-sizing slide. She pivoted because she lived through the exact failure her company now prevents. She traded genetics and computer vision - she holds a patent for fall-detection algorithms - and a clean engineering career for the unglamorous frontier of insurance, where the product is a number that scares people and the win is making them face it early.

Three demographics, hundreds of thousands of quotes, a few seconds

The mechanics are deceptively calm. Waterlily begins with the basics - social-demographic, medical and financial background. From there the model projects a personal trajectory, sorted into early care, moderate care and full care, and matched to where that care would actually happen: a professional setting or, far more often, the home. Then it goes shopping. "In a scan of a few seconds," Lily says, "we've pulled hundreds of thousands of quotes." In 2025 the company shipped a "Quote-and-Apply" flow to collapse the buying process into something a normal person can finish.

The genius is not the AI for its own sake. It is the reframing. Long-term care planning has always been sold as a grim, abstract bet. Waterlily turns it into a forecast specific enough to argue with - which is exactly what makes people act on it.

Consider who buys it. Financial advisors have spent decades avoiding the long-term care conversation precisely because it is uncomfortable and the products are confusing. Waterlily hands them a number and a path, which turns an awkward silence into a billable plan. That is why hundreds of advisors signed on, and why the carriers - the very companies whose policies the tool compares - decided they would rather invest than compete. When Genworth and Nationwide put money into a startup that grades their own products against rivals, they are admitting the old way of selling care was broken.

No hobbies, on purpose

She is candid about the cost of the mission. She works 100-hour weeks and admits she does not really have hobbies outside the company. She has talked openly about how hard it is to find people who match that intensity. You can read that as a warning label or as a thesis statement; with Lily it is plainly the second. The Olympics line is not a brag, it is a description of how she trains.

There is a softer aim underneath the grind. What she wants, she says, is for aging and care to become "a much more respectful, mutual decision, so that everyone could have as sustainable a lifestyle as possible." She is not selling fear. She is selling the conversation she never got to have - the calm one, in advance, before anyone is frail and the bills are already due.

The shape of a life, so far

The bill, sent early - on purpose

The neat thing about Lily Vittayarukskul's story is that it refuses the easy version of itself. The easy version is "prodigy goes to NASA." The real version is "prodigy walks away from NASA because the future she was most equipped to fix was not in orbit - it was at home, in a hospital bed, in a family that stopped speaking." She took an engineer's tools and pointed them at a problem most founders find too sad or too slow to touch.

Long-term care is not a sexy market. It is the one nobody plans for until they are forced to, and by then planning is just panic with a calculator. Waterlily's whole move is to send the invoice early - while there is still time to do something useful with it. That is the through-line from the 16-year-old in two schools at once to the CEO her competitors now buy from: a refusal to let people be ambushed by a cost that was always, quietly, coming.

She is 29. The carriers are already customers. And the question she built a company to answer - how much will your old age actually cost - is one most of us are still too superstitious to ask out loud.

It helps to remember where she came from to see why she is unbothered by the discomfort. A first-generation kid who synchronized two school schedules at once is not going to flinch at a market everyone calls boring. The boring markets are where the unsolved problems hide. Aerospace was crowded with brilliant people; long-term care was crowded with brochures. She picked the one where her own scar tissue gave her an unfair advantage - the rare founder who has personally paid the bill she is now teaching the country to plan for.