A road is an unforgiving place to put an idea. Thousands of people will drive over it without asking about your credentials, your intentions, or the elegance of your calculations. The material has to work. Before he co-founded Blooming Health, Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi spent part of his career helping an unfamiliar kind of asphalt earn that privilege.
The earlier job supplies an unexpectedly useful introduction to the later founder. Roohi’s career moves through doctoral research, road technology, operating responsibility, and decision science. Then comes a company, repeated investor rejection, and eventually a funding announcement with eight figures in it. Read backward from the money, and the story looks inevitable. Read forward from the road, and it looks like a succession of practical questions.
What can you measure? What will someone else accept as evidence? How long can you keep working while the answer remains undecided? Roohi has encountered those questions in laboratories, businesses, and fundraising meetings. The scenery changes more quickly than the questions do.
01An idea still needs permission
In 2014, Roohi joined Green Asphalt, where securing regulatory approval was a central responsibility. The New York company produced fully recycled asphalt. Its process used indirect heating, a different filtering arrangement, and an oil additive to restore flexibility to the material. Among the additives tested was one made from waste food oil that workers liked because it smelled of French fries. Industrial research occasionally has better catering than its reputation suggests.
Roohi worked with city and state transportation departments on production and product specifications, supported by road-performance testing. New York City approved the mix in 2015. Here was the work between a technical possibility and something a public agency would allow into service.
That interval matters. A working sample gives the inventor one kind of confidence. A specification gives everyone else a basis for deciding. An agency has to think about the consequences of adoption, the performance it can expect, and the standards by which it will judge the result. Persuasion involves making those questions answerable.
There is an analogy here for Roohi’s later company building. A new proposition can be sound and still require considerable explanation. The person proposing it has often spent years inside the problem. The person being asked to approve it may be encountering the problem for the first time. Evidence has to cross that distance.
The asphalt episode makes his career more interesting than a list of successive jobs. It shows an engineer working where the calculation meets an institution. That meeting can be slow. It can also decide whether the calculation ever becomes useful outside the laboratory.
02The business education with a balance sheet
Roohi’s formal training took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He completed a master’s degree in civil engineering in 2011 and a doctorate in 2013, studying computational mechanics and road materials. His research used images and modeling to examine how asphalt mixtures behave. It was work concerned with what happens inside a material when forces act on it.
His first exposure to business came earlier. As a secondary-school student, he helped his father, who worked in accounting and banking, enter financial information. A balance sheet was an early encounter with the way numbers describe an enterprise. Later, when he considered an MBA, a mentor suggested that responsibility for a small product and its profit and loss would be a useful education.
The advice placed him close to consequences. A product has customers, costs, deadlines, and decisions that cannot wait for a perfectly complete explanation. Someone has to decide what gets built, what gets spent, and what can be promised. Those responsibilities make an effective supplement to advanced mathematics.
At Green Asphalt, his work expanded from technical direction into a vice-presidential and board role. He also developed Roadin, a phone-based project that collected vibration and location data to assess road quality. There is something pleasingly economical about asking a device already traveling along a road to help describe that road.
He subsequently held a decision-science role at Bayer. By the time he became a founder, he had worked across research and operations. That combination gives the career its particular texture: a concern with testing ideas, followed by the less tidy work of getting them used.
03A hundred answers, a continuing question
Blooming Health was founded in 2020. Roohi’s co-founders were Kavitha Gnanasambandan and Naman Gupta. The partnership matters to the story: however much attention a chief executive receives, a company starts with people accepting responsibility together.
The early fundraising did not supply a smooth introduction to venture capital. Roohi has described roughly a hundred investor passes. Forum Ventures eventually provided an early institutional check of $100,000; its account places the company’s first-year capital at $200,000. Those numbers give the rejection story a practical dimension. While the conversation with investors continued, the company still had to operate.
A pass is both an answer and an ambiguous piece of information. It can concern the market, timing, an investor’s mandate, the explanation, or the company itself. A founder has to decide what deserves revision. Treat every pass as a command and the business becomes a different proposal after every meeting. Ignore all of them and useful information goes unused.
Roohi’s fundraising conversations describe refining the pitch and planning for different funding outcomes while continuing to build. The approach asks for two kinds of work at once: improve the account of the business, and improve the business that account describes. Neither can permanently substitute for the other.
“Let capital follow. Do not follow capital.” His formulation is short enough to fit on a slide. Its demands are considerably larger. A company needs resources to survive, and the person raising them cannot simply declare independence from the question. The phrase instead expresses his preferred direction of travel: choose the work, produce evidence, and seek investors able to recognize it.
“Let capital follow.
Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi · 2026
Do not follow capital.”
04A decision is more than its ending
In February 2022, Roohi published an essay about making decisions under uncertainty. He argued that the quality of a decision should be assessed separately from its eventual result. His proposed method involved considering several scenarios, varying the factors that could influence them, and allowing for error. He named Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets as an influence and expressed interest in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s writing on probability.
This is a useful piece of context for the fundraising story. An investor’s answer arrives at the end of a meeting, which makes it tempting to treat that answer as a complete verdict on everything that preceded it. A longer view leaves more questions open. Was the explanation adequate? Was the audience appropriate? What information was available when the decision was made?
The distinction also complicates success. Once money arrives, earlier choices can acquire a retrospective glow. A favorable result makes it easy to forget the alternatives, the unanswered questions, and the luck involved. Roohi’s stated framework asks the same scrutiny of a good ending that it asks of a disappointing one.
For anyone evaluating a founder, that is a more useful discussion than simply counting the times he continued. Persistence needs judgment. There must be room to change a method, question an assumption, or revise a plan. Otherwise continuing is merely a habit with a budget.
His writing suggests an interest in the process by which choices are made. The resulting portrait is less theatrical than the standard founder legend. It leaves space for incomplete knowledge, considered bets, and mistakes that can teach something. Business would be a simpler occupation if every correct decision arrived carrying a receipt.
05The hour reserved for paper
There is another Roohi in the public record: the reader. In January 2020, he wrote that he enjoyed nonfiction in hard copy and tried to reserve at least an hour a day for it. He liked discussing books, too, and described making friends through those conversations. Encountering perspectives different from his own was part of the attraction.
That detail is useful because it gives conviction some company. His fundraising advice favors founders having a view of what deserves to be built. His account of reading favors hearing views that do not match his. Put together, the two suggest a demanding habit: hold a position firmly enough to act, and keep it open enough to examine.
Paper books also offer a modest counterweight to the speed of business. A page stays where you leave it. The argument is still there when you return. There is no obligation to answer immediately, and no meeting about whether the next chapter should be shorter. The pleasure of reading can survive even when the rest of the day consists of decisions.
It would be too neat to claim that a reading routine explains a funding round. The detail earns its place for a smaller reason. It makes room in the profile for an activity Roohi says he enjoys, and for a form of learning that includes conversation rather than credentials.
His earlier business education, doctoral work, and reading reflections share an interest in understanding how things behave. Sometimes the thing is a material. Sometimes it is a company. Sometimes it is another person’s argument, which has the considerable advantage of being available without first building an asphalt plant.
In his January 2020 reading reflection, Roohi described trying to reserve this much time for nonfiction on paper.
06What follows the money
On April 29, 2025, Blooming Health announced a $26 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with Afore Capital, Crossbeam Venture Partners, and Metrodora Ventures also participating. The announcement put total funding at $32.5 million. It was a substantial change in the resources available to the company Roohi and his partners had started five years earlier.
Funding gives a founder a new set of decisions. Hiring can proceed on a different scale. Product work can have a longer horizon. Commitments become larger, and more people depend on how those commitments are managed. The money changes what is possible; running the business determines what is done with it.
By February 2026, Roohi was discussing that journey with Helena Fogarty on Inside Startup Funding. In September, his public writing introduced a new company chapter under the phrase “Connect Everyone.” The short phrase carries a broad ambition. Its delivery will depend on the same unglamorous activities that populate the earlier chapters: specifying the work, allocating resources, learning from use, and following through.
The road-materials chapter remains a good place to leave him. Roohi had already encountered the distance between something that can work and something others are ready to adopt. Years later, the founder’s task still involves crossing that distance with colleagues, customers, and investors.
His story does not require rejection to be romantic. A hundred passes are a great many meetings. The interesting part is what happened between them: a company continued taking shape, an explanation kept changing, and the work accumulated something other people could examine. An idea gets a hearing. A useful thing earns a place.
Continue the conversation
Explore Roohi’s writing, interviews, and earlier engineering work.