caregiving
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The Backup Plan That Became the Business
Sharon Lurtsema spent decades learning what happens when care falls apart. Then she built a company around making the backup plan feel less like a scramble - and more like infrastructure.
Lily Vittayarukskul
Lily Vittayarukskul is the co-founder and CEO of Waterlily, a San Francisco AI company that predicts when a person will need long-term care, for how long, and what it will cost - then helps families figure out how to pay for it. A child prodigy who started college at 14 and interned at NASA by 16, she pivoted from aerospace engineering to healthcare after her aunt's terminal cancer diagnosis exposed how unprepared most families are for the cost of caregiving. Waterlily runs more than 500 million data points through proprietary AI models, has raised roughly $10 million from investors including Genworth, Nationwide and Edward Jones Ventures, and landed Lily on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Joy Zhang
Joy Zhang is the CEO and Co-Founder of Mon Ami, a San Francisco-based healthtech company building HIPAA-compliant SaaS for agencies that serve older adults and people with disabilities. A Stanford MBA who has volunteered in hospice and dementia care since high school, Zhang co-founded Mon Ami in 2018 after interviewing 150+ seniors and caregivers to understand what the system was missing. Today Mon Ami is used by government agencies and nonprofits across the US, helping them replace manual paperwork with automation - so their staff can focus on care instead of administrative burden. The company has raised over $12M and grown to 180 employees, making it one of the most visible startups in the aging-services technology space.