He saw a surgeon watching a surgical technique DVD and asked why that wasn't a website. Seventeen years later, he's still building the answer.
Fall 2007. Roman Giverts is visiting his girlfriend's parents in the East Bay. Her father, Gregg, is an orthopedic surgeon, and he's sitting at his computer watching a DVD. A surgical technique video - how to repair a clavicle fracture using a procedure he rarely performs. Gregg needs to brush up before the operating room.
Giverts watches and asks the obvious question: why isn't there a website for this? Gregg answers the way surgeons answer questions about things that don't exist yet: "We could use that." VuMedi was born from that sentence.
What makes the origin story stick is the specificity. Not "doctors need better education." Not "there's a gap in the healthcare media market." A particular surgeon. A specific fracture. A DVD. The detail that could only come from watching something real - and immediately seeing what should replace it.
Giverts didn't come to this cold. As the first-ever intern in NBC Universal's Anti-Piracy group, he spent his 2006 summer watching the early online video companies battle for position while the studios tried to shut them down. He had a front-row seat to what the internet would eventually do to video distribution - and to every industry built on it.
Then came TechCrunch. Not the media institution it later became - the original: a blog operated from Mike Arrington's house. Giverts worked out of that living room as a Crunchbase intern in 2007, reading the firehose of startup activity at the exact moment the Web 2.0 wave was cresting. He saw the pattern. He went back to his UC Berkeley apartment and started building.
VuMedi launched in 2008. For most of its existence, it grew without venture capital - quietly, stubbornly, on revenue and product. The company built real partnerships with Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and hundreds of pharma and medical device brands. It reached 500,000 doctors before most of Silicon Valley noticed it existed.
That's the harder thing to do. Anyone can raise money and spend it on growth. Growing a healthcare media company to eight-figure revenue without writing a single pitch deck takes a different kind of patience - and a different kind of belief that you're building something real. Giverts had both.
In May 2025, VuMedi raised an $80M Series B, bringing total funding to $82.1M. By then, the platform had crossed 600,000 healthcare professionals, 100,000 videos, and 25 medical specialties. The money came after the proof - not before it.
VuMedi is a restricted video network. The general public cannot post or comment. Content comes from trusted sources only - leading hospitals, academic medical centers, vetted practitioners. Think of it as a carefully curated private YouTube for clinicians.
Pharma and medical device companies sponsor content channels, giving them a non-interruptive way to reach doctors who are already engaged in education. The model aligns commercial interests with educational value - a cleaner version of what medical conferences have always done.
Revenue sits at $45.5M annually. Partnerships include 100+ pharmaceutical brands and 75+ medical device companies alongside content from Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and other top medical institutions.
Giverts is the product of two colliding worlds - the early internet's video revolution and the clinical world of a surgeon who needed a better resource. That collision produced VuMedi, and seventeen years of building it has made Giverts one of the most patient, underestimated founders in healthcare technology.
He lives in Orinda, in the East Bay hills, with his wife Laura and their three children. He has an engineering office in Zagreb, Croatia, which he noticed was becoming a destination for tech companies before most people were paying attention.
His advice, as paraphrased from multiple interviews: resist the urge to do things that merely sound impressive. Do the thing that creates real economic value. The rest follows - slowly, then all at once.
"We could use that."
— Dr. Gregg (orthopedic surgeon), 2007 - The sentence that started VuMedi
VuMedi was born from a DVD — a surgeon watching a clavicle fracture repair on his computer. Giverts asked why it wasn't online. The answer: nobody had built it.
First intern in NBC Universal's Anti-Piracy division. He spent his time watching the early YouTube-era companies the studios were trying to destroy.
Interned at TechCrunch when it operated out of Mike Arrington's actual house. The office was a living room. The company was already making history from it.
VuMedi grew to $45.5M in annual revenue before raising serious venture capital. The $80M Series B in 2025 came after proving the model, not before it.
VuMedi has a significant engineering office in Zagreb, Croatia - a city Giverts noted was becoming a tech destination before most Silicon Valley founders noticed.
Lives in Orinda, East Bay, with wife Laura and three kids. The East Bay is where the story started — in the home of an orthopedic surgeon named Gregg.