The plumbing metaphor is his, not mine. He wants social care to arrive in every household the way tap water does - dependably, quietly, without a form to fill out. His startup, Blooming Health, is the pipe.
CEO and Co-founder, Blooming Health / New York, NY
A founder who used to write papers about asphalt. Photo courtesy of Blooming Health.
Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi runs a company called Blooming Health out of a Manhattan office on West 23rd Street, and the thing he sells is boring in the best way: automated outreach, screening, and referrals. If you are 82 and on Medicaid in Chautauqua County, someone at your local office for the aging probably uses Blooming Health to text you in your preferred language about a ride to the pharmacy. If you are a nonprofit trying to keep track of 6,000 seniors, Blooming Health is the software that stops any of them from disappearing between renewals.
The company has raised $32.5 million, most recently a $26 million Series A led by Insight Partners in April 2025. It operates across 25 states, has facilitated roughly $27 million in social care spend, and counts more than 1,500 community organizations as customers. The CEO's title on LinkedIn is unfussy - "CEO and Cofounder at Blooming Health" - which is either false modesty or (more likely) the product of someone who spent a decade in industrial data science before he ever wrote a pitch deck.
Roohi's public thesis is that AI in healthcare has been oversold as a replacement for human contact and undersold as a routing problem. Care managers, he likes to point out, will spend 30 to 45 minutes on a phone call with an older adult, and that call is often the person's only human interaction all day. His view: don't automate the call away. Automate everything around it so the call happens with the person who most needs it.
The pitch is that closed-loop referrals for food, transport, housing, and prescription support are, at a technical level, a workflow problem sitting on top of a data problem sitting on top of a language problem. Blooming Health integrates with EHRs and Medicaid systems, screens people for social needs across a hundred-odd languages, sends automated multilingual outreach through the channel each person actually reads, and then measures whether the referral closed.
Blooming Health calls this "last-mile delivery of social care." The company brands itself as a social health platform. The specific insight is that community-based organizations - the county aging offices, the food pantries, the transportation nonprofits - have been treated as afterthoughts in health-tech procurement, and that if you build software for them first, hospitals will follow.
The most interesting sentence in Roohi's Google Scholar page is not a sentence at all. It is the title of his most-cited paper: Aggregate structure characterisation of asphalt mixtures using two-dimensional image analysis. It has 234 citations. His h-index is 11. He got a PhD in computational mechanics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison between 2011 and 2013 and spent the early part of his career, more or less, thinking about how tiny stones distribute themselves inside a slab of hot asphalt.
After the PhD he was a vice president and board member at Green Asphalt, then a global data science lead at Bayer, where he spent roughly a decade building machine learning tools for healthcare. That second act - the Bayer years - explains why a civil-engineering academic can run a healthtech company without it looking like a mid-career pivot. The underlying skill was always statistical modeling. The material changed from bitumen to Medicaid claims.
There is a joke here about paving the road to social care, and I will refuse to make it. What matters is that when Roohi says AI should be interoperable and calibrated and boring, he says it with the affect of someone who has written a lot of Python and read a lot of specs.
In 2020 his mother-in-law was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. He and his wife became full-time caregivers, locked down in New York City, unable to draw on the informal support network most families rely on. What they discovered - the thing families always discover, but that the health system never fully absorbs - is that the medical part of care is the smaller part. The larger part is groceries, prescriptions, transportation, someone to talk to.
Blooming Health was founded that year in East Harlem. In the earliest days, according to the company's own retelling, his mother-in-law would knock on the door during back-to-back investor pitches to bring him hot water and a word of encouragement. She was, he has said, the most influential person on his decision to start the company. This is either the sort of detail you invent for a Series A press cycle or the sort of detail you cannot invent. It reads like the latter.
Total raised: $32.5M. Lead investor 2025: Insight Partners. Other backers: Afore Capital, Crossbeam Venture Partners, Metrodora Ventures.
Subject area: asphalt materials, imaging analysis, computational mechanics. Not healthcare.
Blooming Health was founded in a New York City neighborhood that most healthcare companies serve as a customer segment, not a home.
The 2023 round included Metrodora Ventures, Clinton's fund. Insight Partners followed with the 2025 Series A.
The stated post-Series A goal: reach 10 million people with automated social care outreach within 12 months.
The founder still shows up in Google Scholar for pavement engineering. He is that rare CEO whose academic h-index is unrelated to his day job.
His mother-in-law - who lived with him, and who had stage 4 cancer - would knock during pitch calls with tea and encouragement. She is on his shortlist of most influential people.
The tap-water line is not marketing. It's Roohi telling investors the ceiling is universality, not premium tier.
Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi is the co-founder and CEO of Blooming Health, a New York-based startup automating outreach and referrals for social care services.
A SaaS platform that uses AI to connect community organizations, health systems, and government agencies with older adults and Medicaid populations needing food, transportation, housing, and other social supports.
$32.5 million in total, including a $26M Series A led by Insight Partners in April 2025.
A PhD in computational mechanics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, roles at Green Asphalt and Bayer, and a decade of machine learning work in healthcare.
He became a full-time caregiver for his mother-in-law during the pandemic and saw firsthand the gap between medical care and social support.