Long before Robbie Felton had a company to run, he had a passenger-seat education. His mother, Sonja, worked as a geriatric social worker in Michigan and sometimes brought him along on visits with older and disabled clients. The rooms changed. The lesson accumulated. Care was personal, complicated and dependent on people who could make sense of many moving parts at once.
One of those relationships became wonderfully specific. In high school, Felton and a friend met a retired college football coach through a PACE program where his mother worked. They talked football, kept visiting and built a rapport. The coach began following their high school careers and collecting newspaper clippings about them. Years later, Felton would speak fluently about platforms, interoperability and risk adjustment. But his original unit of attention was a person who remembered the box score.
This helps explain why IntusCare, the company Felton co-founded while at Brown University, did not begin as a generic technology hunting for a healthcare use. It began with years of proximity to a specific kind of care, then a stubborn attempt to understand why the people delivering it were surrounded by information yet still struggled to see what required action.
“There was a major disconnect between the data that was out there and the care being provided to patients.”Robbie Felton
A problem worth leaving school for
Felton arrived at Brown in 2017 to study public health and pre-med. He also played varsity football, where he met Evan Jackson. Their first swing together was an algae-to-biofuel concept entered in a Hult Prize competition. It did not become their company, but it served a quieter purpose: each learned how the other approached an uncertain problem.
The healthcare idea had a firmer root. During school breaks, Felton returned to Ann Arbor and talked with his mother, who had become an executive director in PACE and later a National PACE Association board member. PACE, short for the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, coordinates medical and social services so participants can continue living in their communities. Its care teams carry clinical, operational and financial responsibility together. That creates a rich picture of each participant and a formidable amount of data.
Felton saw the absurdity: the information existed, but often arrived in formats that did little to support the next decision. He recruited Jackson, whose strengths leaned toward business, and public-health and economics student Samuel Prado. Computer science student Alex Rothberg later joined to lead the technical work. The team had four young founders and a mature instinct: postpone the grand solution until they understood the ordinary day.
Do not study only the market. Study the shift change, the handoff, the spreadsheet, the workaround and the question a customer has learned to stop asking.
Felton and Jackson stepped away from Brown for a year. Several founders temporarily moved to Michigan and shadowed Sonja Felton at Huron Valley PACE. They spoke with nursing homes, home-health organizations, hospitals and health plans. They worked long weeks around providers, administrators and participants. Felton later described patience as essential to his leadership, and this was patience with dirt under its fingernails: more than a year of research before the team tried to build or raise money.
The customer who made the company real
Back at Brown, the founders put the venture through the Nelson Center's Breakthrough Lab. Faculty and advisers helped pressure-test the research. Dr. Megan Ranney offered a clinician's view and connected the students with experts. The team became a MassChallenge finalist in 2019, receiving $50,000, then won the Brown Venture Prize and $25,000 in 2020. Capital mattered. A customer mattered more.
PACE of Rhode Island became that first customer. The students arrived with their research and a working proposition, but also a useful question: what do you need that you do not have? The answer was accessible analytics. The organization shared its data and helped the team build a minimum viable product around actual work. By fall 2020, 300 Rhode Island participants were represented in the system. A year later, IntusCare was working with PACE organizations across seven states.
One early result showed the point of the product. A provider knew hospitalizations had risen but could not see why. IntusCare's system connected the increase to a cluster of infections, giving the care team a clearer path to respond. The interesting part was not that an algorithm found a pattern. It was that a provider could use the pattern while there was still something to do.
The IntusCare operating loop
That sequence became a durable operating philosophy. Felton talks about technology as infrastructure for care teams, not theater for software buyers. The distinction sounds small until one remembers how many tools ask workers to change a complicated job so the database can feel tidy.
“We want to help them scale a high-quality, high-value model of care to as many participants as efficiently and effectively as possible, nationwide.”Robbie Felton
From one insight to an ecosystem
IntusCare expanded in concentric circles. Its population-health analytics helped organizations identify risk and visualize trends. IRIS added real-time risk-adjustment work. CareHub became an electronic medical record and practice-management platform designed around PACE's interdisciplinary teams. Services for utilization management and population health widened the company's involvement from showing information to supporting how organizations act on it.
The financing followed the scope. IntusCare closed a $14.1 million Series A led by Deerfield Management in 2022. A further $11.5 million round announced in January 2025 brought reported funding above $27 million. By that year, the company said it served more than 70 PACE organizations. In CareHub's first year, the platform reached 33 programs across 16 states.
Recognition arrived too. Felton and co-founders Jackson and Rothberg appeared on Forbes' 2024 30 Under 30 healthcare list. Felton was named an AfroTech Future 50 Founder of the Year, recognized by Rock Health among its digital-health system disruptors, and selected for Modern Healthcare's 2026 40 Under 40. His response to the latter redirected the spotlight toward the team and partner organizations. It is a consistent habit. In public posts about funding and milestones, gratitude usually appears before victory laps.
Patience at scale
A startup can live on intimacy with a few customers. A larger company has to preserve that intimacy while building repeatable systems. This is now Felton's central tension. IntusCare entered 2026 with a majority growth investment and partnership from Blue Star Innovation Partners. Felton said the company wanted more than capital. It wanted a partner experienced in scaling software inside a regulated, impact-driven industry.
IntusCare takes shape in Brown's Breakthrough Lab.
The team wins the Brown Venture Prize and launches with PACE of Rhode Island.
A $14.1 million Series A supports national expansion.
CareHub goes live, and reported total funding passes $27 million.
Blue Star Innovation Partners makes a majority growth investment.
Felton's own view of PACE has widened with the company. In March 2026, he argued that bipartisan policy support and federal funding had moved the model from validation toward expansion. He predicted a national census of 250,000 participants by the end of 2030, up from more than 90,000 at the end of 2025. His warning accompanied the forecast: rapid growth could reintroduce fragmentation unless organizations had infrastructure that preserved interdisciplinary care.
It is the same problem, enlarged. A team possesses plenty of facts, decisions arrive quickly, and good intentions can disappear between disconnected systems. The answer Felton keeps returning to is coordination made visible and usable.
There is another continuity worth noticing. When Felton and Jackson were asked about giving back, Felton said neither had turned down a call from a Black founder or healthcare entrepreneur seeking advice about starting or raising capital. Many people had helped them without obligation, he explained, so they intended to carry the practice forward. It is network effects in their friendliest form.
The long plan
In 2021, as he finished his Brown degree requirements, Felton said medical school remained part of his long-term plan, after IntusCare had made the impact it needed to make. Whether that chapter arrives is less revealing than the phrasing. His ambition has always had a sequence. Learn the system. Build what the people inside it can use. Expand without sanding away the qualities that made the model work.
The sequence resists a common founder temptation: confusing urgency with understanding. Felton has said that nothing is as urgent as it first appears and that clear decisions require stopping to survey the consequences. Healthcare does not grant infinite time, of course. His point is sharper. Careful preparation is how a team earns the ability to move quickly when the decision truly matters.
The boy on home visits became a public-health student. The student became an apprentice to the workflow. The apprentice became a CEO. Yet the job, as he tells it, remains recognizable: help a care team notice the right thing in time. Everything else is infrastructure.