Founder / Profile
Matthew Loper
He pays people a dollar a day to take their medicine. The strange part is how well it works.
MATT LOPER, CEO of Wellth. Ex-Goldman, ex-OrbiMed, forever a Lakers fan.
He pays people a dollar a day to take their medicine. The strange part is how well it works.
Matthew Loper runs Wellth, and Wellth runs on a single stubborn idea: knowing what is good for you and actually doing it are two different sports. The app he co-founded in 2014 does not lecture. It does not nag. It hands out small cash rewards - a dollar or two a day - for the boring, life-saving stuff: taking your medication, checking your blood sugar, showing up to the appointment you would rather cancel.
The people Wellth serves are the ones the rest of the system finds hard to reach. Medicare Advantage members. Medicaid enrollees. Dual-eligible patients juggling several chronic conditions at once. For them, the difference between a managed disease and a hospital stay is often just a habit that never formed. Loper built a company around closing that gap, one daily check-in at a time.
The results are what turned a contrarian thesis into a fundable business. Health plans and providers working with Wellth report a 42% average drop in inpatient utilization and a 29% drop in emergency-department visits. Medication adherence climbs 16%. In August 2025, investors handed Loper an oversubscribed $36 million Series C, pushing total funding past $73 million.
It is a strange thing to lead with, in a category obsessed with algorithms and dashboards, but Loper keeps coming back to it: the hard part of health is not the diagnosis. It is the Tuesday. The refill you meant to pick up. The reading you meant to take. Wellth is engineered for that Tuesday, and for the millions of Tuesdays that decide whether a chronic condition stays quiet or lands someone in a bed that costs the system thousands of dollars a night.
Give tangible and immediate gratification for the right behaviors.
The contrast would not leave him alone. If two people who loved each other, ate at the same table, and heard the same doctor could end up so far apart, then the missing ingredient was not information. It was behavior.
That question - why do people act against their own interest even when they know better - is the whole field of behavioral economics. Loper had arrived at it the long way around. A biological engineer by training at MIT, he went into healthcare investment banking at Goldman Sachs, then became an analyst at OrbiMed Advisors, one of the largest dedicated healthcare investment firms, with roughly $13 billion under management. He spent his days reading spreadsheets on medical devices and health-tech companies.
From that seat he noticed something the pitch decks kept dancing around. The industry did not have a technology shortage. It had a behavior shortage. Money was pouring into apps and devices, and patients still were not doing the simple things that kept them out of the hospital. So in 2014, when digital health was young and the money was thin, he left the analyst chair and built the thing he could not stop thinking about.
Founding a company in that moment was not glamorous. Digital health had not yet become a venture darling, capital was hard to find, and health plans move on the timescale of continents, not startups. Loper has talked openly about the grind of a roughly one-year sales cycle and the challenge of holding a scrappy team together on almost nothing. What carried them, he says, was not the promise of an exit. It was the population they served - people for whom a working habit was, quite literally, the difference between a normal life and an early one.
Classic economics says a reward is a reward. Behavioral economics says people hate losing something they already have far more than they enjoy gaining something new. Wellth builds its whole product on that quirk.
A member joins through their health plan and gets a monthly reward balance - money that already feels like theirs.
Each day they photograph their medication or complete a care task. AI-powered image recognition confirms it.
Miss a day and a small amount comes off the balance. The sting of losing it is the nudge that builds the habit.
Stay consistent and cash out. Over weeks, the daily ritual becomes routine - and the health outcomes follow.
For decades, American healthcare paid for volume. More procedures, more visits, more billing. A patient who quietly stayed well was, in accounting terms, a missed opportunity. That arithmetic is changing. Under value-based care, Medicare Advantage and Medicaid plans increasingly get rewarded for keeping members healthy and penalized when they land in the hospital. Star ratings, care-gap closure and total cost of care are suddenly line items that matter.
That shift is the tailwind under Wellth. When a plan is on the hook for outcomes, a tool that measurably lifts adherence and cuts hospital use stops being a nice-to-have and starts being a lever. Loper's 2025 Series C reflected exactly that appetite: the round was oversubscribed, led by Mercato Partners, with participation from firms including FCA Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures, SignalFire and New York Life. The money is earmarked to widen access across Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, D-SNP and other high-need groups, and to push further into AI - including image recognition that verifies a med was actually taken.
Wellth now frames itself less as an app and more as a daily care motivation platform. The distinction matters to Loper. An app is something you download and forget. Motivation is something you have to earn again every single day - which, conveniently, is exactly what a chronic condition demands.
Healthcare investment banking at Goldman Sachs, then healthcare investing at OrbiMed Advisors (~$13B AUM). He learns to read the industry from the inside.
Loper co-founds Wellth in Los Angeles and becomes CEO, betting on behavior change when digital-health funding was scarce.
A fresh round fuels expansion of the cash-back adherence model across more health-plan partners.
Capital arrives to push the behavioral-economics approach deeper into chronic-condition management.
Led by Mercato Partners, the round scales Wellth's AI-powered daily care motivation platform into Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and D-SNP populations.
Oversubscribed. Led by Mercato Partners with SignalFire, Comcast Ventures and others.
Seed through Series B, including $10M in 2020 and a $20M raise.
Total capital raised to build the daily care motivation platform.
Business isn't a spreadsheet. It's running a company with people you really care about.
Loper is candid that the confidence he brought from finance did not survive contact with a real company. Reading a spreadsheet, he found, is not the same as running the thing the spreadsheet describes. Early on he wrestled with keeping a small team motivated through a one-year sales cycle and next to no resources. What kept them going, he says, was the mission - serving people the system tends to forget.
His decision-making leans hard on data. He forms a hypothesis, then goes looking for the evidence that would prove himself wrong before he commits. And his leadership creed borrows from former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink: extreme ownership. When an objective fails, you do not point at the weather.
Some of it he learned nowhere near a boardroom. Coaching youth sports showed him how powerfully external forces shape what people do - the same insight he later engineered into Wellth's incentive design. A former college baseball player himself, he still thinks like a competitor.
Lifelong Los Angeles Lakers fan. The team is not a phase.
Played college baseball. Still thinks in innings and margins.
Owns an Australian Shepherd named Luna, the most adherent member of the household.
Studied biological engineering at MIT before ever touching a trading floor.
Tries to prove his own hypotheses wrong before he acts on them.
Chose the hardest patients first - Medicaid and Medicare, on purpose.
The next number he's chasing isn't a valuation. It's a million members.