Our Investment in Ultralight

In venture capital, the best investments often feel obvious in retrospect. You see a founder identify an 'insurmountable' problem, back them early, and then watch the market catch up to their vision. Today, Ultralight announced their $9M fundraise (full story in Axios). I've been thinking about when we first met two years ago - back when the company was called Vibrant Practice, and had just two people and an early customer.

The Problem We Identified

In the summer of 2024, Ultralight's co-founders, Sunita Mohanty and Pedro Tabio, walked me through their vision of preventative healthcare. One where people actively increase their healthspan by getting to the root cause of sickness. In truth, many entrepreneurs had walked me through this kind of vision. But this team felt different - why? Because they identified the key bottleneck: doctors being weighed down by bottom-line focused hospital systems and private equity roll-ups, stripped of autonomy, and forced to see patients in shorter and shorter time slots. Sunita and Pedro laid out a path back to personalized medicine: independent physicians who had the infrastructure, the technology, and the financial model to practice medicine the way they knew best.

In some ways, it was perfect timing, as I had been studying the quiet revolution of doctors returning to independent practice.

Over the past two decades, independent medical practices have been decimated. In 2005, ~20% of practices were hospital-owned. By 2022, that number hit 40%. The reason? Rising malpractice premiums, collapsing reimbursement rates, and the promise that private equity would make things better. Instead, physicians reported less autonomy, and the sense that clinical decisions were being made by finance teams in boardrooms.

The data on this is striking. In one survey, over 60% of physicians viewed private equity involvement negatively. Only 10% saw it as positive. Yet despite this resentment, few doctors had a realistic alternative. Starting an independent practice meant navigating credentialing, malpractice insurance, marketing, tech stack integration, and business operations.

The Bet We Made

We were one of the first institutional backers in Ultralight's pre-seed round because we had a simple thesis: the window for independent, high-quality personalized medicine was opening, and the right infrastructure could unlock it. Doctors needed a platform that handled the complexity while they focused on what they were trained to do, which was take care of patients.

The founding team had the domain expertise that we value in any team we back. Sunita's background spanned product at Meta, and AI strategy, and she had personally navigated the functional medicine system. With this background, we knew she could tackle the nuances of healthcare product. Pedro then brought engineering discipline from Stride, a company serving independent workers. Together, they aligned to both have the chops to listen and sell to clinicians, and build a product that served clinicians' needs.

Early conversations with physicians onboarding onto Ultralight's platform were crucial to getting us over the line. We spoke with one doctor who had just left a corporate-owned primary care company, exhausted by the break-neck pace and the impossible pressure to see more patients in less time. He joined Ultralight because the platform gave him something that company couldn't: space to talk to patients about diet, sleep, stress, exercise, and root cause. All the things that actually prevent disease.

The math had to work though, and it wasn't super obvious. We needed to believe that physicians could actually build sustainable, profitable independent practices. The model at the time was direct-to-consumer concierge medicine. If a physician could build a patient panel of 150 patients, the unit economics worked. And given the shortage of accessible, high-quality primary care in most markets, the demand seemed like it was there.

What Happened Next

The market validated the thesis faster than we expected. Physicians moved. Patient cohorts grew. At the same time, Sunita and Pedro knew they needed to listen to their users and evolve.

The early vision was infrastructure for independent practices. But as physicians onboarded, it became clear that the limiting factor wasn't just back-office complexity, it was information complexity. Doctors wanted to synthesize data from wearables, labs, and diagnostics in a way that modern EHRs never enabled. They wanted their notes written for them; an AI co-pilot in the exam room; and their patient portals to feel like modern software, something the big EHRs struggled to do for smaller practices.

So they built it. They brought EHR capabilities in-house and engineered AI directly into the clinical workflow, creating a platform built around how clinicians actually practice medicine. The results speak for themselves: growth from 1 clinic at the time of our investment to 75 clinics and 1,200 clinicians today.

That's why their announcement matters. Ultralight is no longer just the platform that makes independent practice possible. It's become the full-stack EHR built for how modern physicians actually want to work: individualized, data-driven, AI-augmented, and centered on patient outcomes rather than throughput.

Why It Matters Now

We're at an inflection point in healthcare. Physicians are exhausted. Patients are demanding access to better care, and the traditional system is visibly cracking.

Into that void steps a company building infrastructure for a different model. Not a new type of health system designed to be acquired by another health system. But a platform that levels the playing field for physicians, arms them with modern technology, and lets them practice medicine in a way that serves both their patients and their own well-being.

Is it a moonshot? Of course. But the backlash against PE in healthcare is real. Doctors are tired. And for the first time in decades, there's a viable alternative infrastructure for them.

We're proud to have backed Sunita and Pedro early. The trajectory from Vibrant Practice to Ultralight shows something important: the best founders don't just solve the problem they started with. They evolve as they learn, build bigger, and hold a vision that gets clearer with time.

Congrats to the team on a well-earned seed round. We're excited to see what comes next.

‍