The mark: a single white W on deep navy. Quiet, like the subject it takes on.
San Francisco · AI · Long-Term Care
Waterlily.
The company doing the math on a bill almost nobody wants to open - the cost of getting old.
The company doing the math on a bill almost nobody wants to open - the cost of getting old.
Somewhere this afternoon, a financial advisor is sitting across from a couple in their late fifties. The retirement projections look fine. The 401(k) chart slopes reassuringly upward. Then the advisor clicks to a slide that used to be a shrug and a vague warning, and now it is a number: the odds this couple needs long-term care, the age it likely begins, how many hours a day, for how long, and what it will cost them. The number is large. The room goes quiet. And for the first time, the conversation has somewhere to go.
That slide is Waterlily. It is a piece of software that takes the single most-avoided subject in personal finance - the slow, expensive business of needing help to live - and turns it into something you can actually plan around. Not a scare tactic. A forecast, and then a set of moves.
Long-term care is the gap nobody budgets for. Health insurance does not cover it. Medicare barely touches it. Most people assume family will manage, until family cannot. Waterlily's argument is simple: if the risk is this predictable, why are we all still planning for it with a shrug?
Lily Vittayarukskul was not supposed to end up here. She started college at 14, interned at NASA by 16, and was on a clean trajectory toward aerospace engineering - the kind of resume that usually ends with rockets, not retirement math. Then her aunt was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, and the family ran headfirst into the wall that Waterlily now exists to knock down: health insurance does not pay for long-term care. The costs were staggering, unplanned, and completely invisible until the moment they arrived.
She finished at UC Berkeley with degrees in genetics and data science - an unusual pairing that turns out to be exactly the right one for modeling how human bodies age and how much that aging costs. She teamed up with Evan Ehrenberg, a co-founder with a computational-neuroscience background of his own, and pointed all that horsepower at a problem most technologists find deeply unglamorous.
Our application of AI makes the process seamless for families to know what to do today to secure tomorrow.- Lily Vittayarukskul, Co-Founder & CEO
Ex-NASA intern, UC Berkeley genetics & data science, Forbes 30 Under 30 2026 (Social Impact). Started Waterlily after her family discovered long-term care costs the hard way.
Reportedly started college at 11 and a Ph.D. candidate at MIT in computational neuroscience. Previously co-founded Clara Health before building Waterlily's operations.
Waterlily is sold to advisors and insurance carriers, not consumers directly. Here is what lands on their screen.
AI models trained on 500M+ data points forecast the likelihood of needing care, the age it starts, how needs progress, and the hours or months required - by provider type.
Personalized plans that fold in a family's finances, existing insurance, and healthcare trends to show exactly what to do today to fund care tomorrow.
Launched Oct 2025: evaluates hundreds of thousands of LTC insurance configurations in under a second, flags underwriting risks, auto-fills 70%+ of the application, and simulates ROI.
B2B software (reported ~$250/seat/month) that lets advisors run coverage-gap analysis and turn an awkward conversation into closed business.
Caption: The pitch fits on one screen. The dread it replaces used to fill a whole appointment.
Traditional financial planning tools have just not kept pace with long-term care complexity and uncertainty.- John Kim, Brewer Lane Ventures
Caption: When Genworth and Nationwide fund the upstart, the upstart is no longer just an upstart.
Lily Vittayarukskul and Evan Ehrenberg start Waterlily to make long-term care costs visible and plannable.
Waterlily goes live for advisors and carriers.
Led by Brewer Lane Ventures with Genworth, Nationwide, and Edward Jones Ventures. Domain upgrades to waterlily.com.
Near-instant analysis of hundreds of thousands of LTC insurance policies.
Lily Vittayarukskul named to the 2026 list for Social Impact; wider media coverage follows.
The couple who went quiet at the number does not stay quiet. Because the slide did not stop at the scary part. It kept going - here is when, here is how much, here is the policy that closes the gap, here is what it costs each month, here is the application already three-quarters filled out. The dread had somewhere to go.
That is the whole trick. Waterlily did not invent the cost of aging, and it cannot make it cheap. What it changed is the moment of contact - from a vague fear you push off for another decade into a plan you can sign this afternoon. A company that started with one family blindsided by a bill is now handing other families the forecast that family never got.