At Vitalize, our mission is to unlock healthcare's full capacity.

Today, we're excited to share that we've raised a $31M Series A led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Norwest Ventures, Y Combinator, .406 Ventures, Constellation Ventures, and the MemorialCare Innovation Fund (one of our own customers), to help us run toward this mission.

Here's why we started, what we've learned, and where we're going.

Air traffic control for the healthcare workforce

Every day, tens of thousands of flights cross U.S. airspace. Each one is tracked, sequenced, and rerouted in real time. When a storm rolls in or a runway closes, the system reroutes hundreds of flights in minutes, keeps every plane safely apart, and notifies passengers right away. Millions of people still get where they need to go, safely.

Hospitals face the same kind of real-time coordination challenge, and the stakes are far higher, yet no one ever built them a control tower.

Step into a hospital staffing office at 6am. Two nurses have called out sick. The ED is boarding patients, and new admits are headed to the ICU. A staffing coordinator is on her fourth call with a nurse manager, with a spreadsheet in one window and a group text in the other. She's trying to find someone who's qualified, available, and not already on overtime. By the 7am huddle, the plan has changed a dozen times.

At the same time, labor is the biggest expense in American healthcare, nearly $1 trillion a year. Health systems spend an estimated $50B of it on premium labor, and a single system can spend $20M to $100M a year. Most of that isn't a labor shortage. The right people usually exist. There's just no system to get them to the right place at the right time, and it's all stitched together by spreadsheets and phone calls.

Road-tripping across the country to live the problem

In the early days, we didn't have a home base. We lived out of suitcases, going from hospital to hospital: sitting in staffing offices at 3am, shadowing charge nurses through call-outs, and listening in on bed huddles.

We sat down with staffing coordinators and even did the job with them: balancing schedules by hand in the same spreadsheets, making the same calls to fill last-minute gaps, and feeling firsthand how much of the day disappeared into the scramble.

That closeness became how we build, and it’s been deeply rewarding to build something our customers care about this deeply— to walk onto a hospital floor and be greeted with hugs by the people we build for. When a hospital runs on Vitalize, it has to work every minute of every day, because they rely on it every single second.

What we've built

Vitalize is the labor operating system for healthcare: the air traffic control for healthcare's workforce.

We forecast patient demand and model staffing supply: skills, costs, FTE status, and union rules. From there, we build better schedules and manage the constant changes of the day. Unit leaders, staffing offices, command centers and frontline staff all work in the same place.

Most importantly, Vitalize is a system of action, not a system of record. Healthcare has plenty of tools that report on what already happened. Vitalize helps clinical leaders decide and execute what should happen next, while keeping them in the driver's seat. And because we integrate deeply with existing time, payroll, and EHR systems, teams get all of this without disrupting the workflows they already rely on.

Today, Vitalize powers labor operations across 1,000+ bed academic medical centers to rural hospitals hours from the nearest airport. We’ve seen health systems cut their premium labor spend by more than 40%, and clinical leaders are getting back 10+ hours every week.

It's incredibly hard to build software that delivers value and is loved by every stakeholder in a health system, from frontline staff to executives. Everyone feels this problem, just in different ways: for health system executives, it's premium labor spend; for nursing leaders, it's time and administrative burden; and for frontline staff, it's fairness, transparency, and flexibility in their schedules.

Looking to the future

This funding fuels the next chapter. We're focused on three things.

Supporting the enterprise. Labor decisions no longer happen one unit at a time. They happen across dozens of hospitals, hundreds of units, and thousands of staff. We're scaling Vitalize to meet health systems at that size, with the reliability, integrations, and support that the largest systems in the country need, across all service lines.

Improving our labor intelligence. Every decision that runs through Vitalize makes the next one better. We're investing deeply in demand forecasting and recommendation systems: predicting patient volume before it arrives, factoring in what each patient needs, and giving clinical leaders recommendations they can trust and act on in seconds.

Bridging labor and capacity. Our thesis is simple: labor and capacity are the same problem. A bed without a nurse isn't capacity. A nurse in the wrong place is wasted cost. Every ED admit, OR case, and discharge changes who needs to be where. Yet most hospitals manage staffing and patient flow in separate systems, with separate teams, in separate meetings. We believe the future is one system that sees both, moving staff and patients together in real time so hospitals can care for every patient who needs them.

Thank you

To the nurses, unit managers, staffing coordinators and frontline staff who let us sit beside them, designed this platform alongside us, and constantly pushed us to get it right: thank you. Vitalize exists because of you.

To our team, who've spent nights on go-lives, weekends on flights, and days on hospital floors: thank you for taking a bet on the mission, building this with us, and shaping a culture that's taking on one of healthcare's hardest problems.

And to our investors, especially Oak HC/FT and Norwest: thank you for believing in this as much as we do.

Here's to what's next

We started Vitalize because the people holding hospitals together deserve better than spreadsheets and phone calls.

The problem we're solving is one of the hardest in healthcare, and it demands the best people in the world to solve it. We're just getting started.

If you want to help unlock healthcare's full capacity, come build with us →

— Veeraj & Sanketh