How Nima Roohi Raised $32.5M to Close the Social Care Gap After 100+ Investor Rejections

This story first appeared in Forum Ventures’ Founder Stories Series on Substack.

Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi spent over a decade building machine learning tools for healthcare from the inside. As Principal Data Scientist and Head of Decision Science at Bayer, he ran a global data science and AI team that trained models on roughly 65 million American patients’ electronic health records. The models flagged clinical risk for physicians in hospital settings. He understood how the system worked — from the inside.

Then he became a caregiver. A loved one was diagnosed with cancer, and suddenly Roohi was on the other side of the system he had spent his career building for. Simple things mattered more than he expected — getting a ride from home to the clinic for chemotherapy or immunotherapy. The gap between what the clinical system tracked and what his family actually needed was unmistakable.

“We almost know by the minute a diabetic patient’s blood sugar level,” he said. “But we don’t know whether they have enough food on the table to eat.”

That gap — between what clinical data captures and the non-medical realities that determine health outcomes — became the foundation of Blooming Health. Together with co-founders Kavitha Gnanasambandan and Naman Gupta, Roohi set out to build the infrastructure that closes it. Blooming Health is now a Forum Ventures portfolio company reaching close to 7 million people across 25 states.

How the pandemic forced the first version

Roohi, Gnanasambandan, and Gupta were already building toward a company when March 2020 accelerated the timeline. COVID-19 shut down New York City. The population most exposed — older adults managing chronic conditions — suddenly could not pick up prescriptions, grocery shop, or see a doctor in person. Most of them also faced technology and language barriers on top of it.

That was the moment Blooming Health launched its first product: an engagement solution that reached people through whatever channel they already used. A landline. A flip phone. A text message. In their own language. The team built for the people who had been left furthest outside the reach of digital health tools, because those were exactly the people most at risk.

What Blooming Health does today

Five and a half years later, Blooming Health has evolved into a full end-to-end platform. The company works with more than 2,500 organizations — government agencies, health systems, health plans, and community-based organizations — and connects care to close to 7 million people across 25 states.

The system runs on AI agents specialized in specific needs: food insecurity, housing, transportation, and benefits. Each agent integrates directly with the community organizations that fulfill those needs, from food banks to rideshare health programs to housing operations. Sitting on top of telecom infrastructure, Blooming Health reaches people by text or voice call, in whatever language they speak, and closes the loop on the need it detects.

“You could think of it as a digital tissue in the community,” Roohi said, “that automates access to social care and makes it easy, whether you’re an older adult or a younger person in the Medicaid population, whether you have a smartphone or a landline, whether you live in downtown Manhattan or rural Texas.”

Why 100 investors said no — and what finally worked

Blooming Health has since raised $32.5M cumulatively, including a $26M Series A led by Insight Partners. None of that came easily at the start.

In 2020 and 2021, most investors had never heard of the social care ecosystem, let alone been asked to underwrite it as a venture-scale business. Roohi spent months talking to hundreds of investors, making the case for a category that was real but unfamiliar. “We knew this was a big problem. We knew this was going to be a massive business,” he said. “But we were having a hard time telling that story and communicating it to investors.”

Some investors passed intentionally just to see if the team would still be standing in three or six months — a test of conviction before engaging seriously. Roohi estimates the team heard close to 100 no’s before Forum’s first check came in.

That check was $100,000. A second $100,000 came from an investor connected through Forum. Blooming Health ran its entire first year on that $200,000 combined — in a year when seed rounds elsewhere were opening at $5 to $10 million.

Forum’s read had less to do with the pitch and more to do with the team. “I don’t think Forum invested because they thought this was a sexy business that was going to blow up,” Roohi said. “It was because these founders are cockroaches. They’re not going to die. They’re going to get it done.” Persistence, more than narrative, is what unlocked the first capital.

What Forum Ventures provides early-stage founders

Forum’s first check gave Blooming Health more than capital. For a team building in a category that most investors had never heard of, having a first believer who would make introductions and vouch for the team mattered enormously in opening doors to the next conversation.

The Forum network also provided the connections that turned a $100,000 check into $200,000 — a second investor brought in directly through Forum — giving the team enough runway to prove the model before the broader market caught up to what they were building.

Nima’s advice for founders earlier in the journey

Asked what he would tell a founder earlier in their journey, Roohi pointed to two things above everything else: pain tolerance and first-principles thinking.

“Hearing no is painful. Figuring things out with limited resources is painful. Wearing different hats and managing constant change is painful,” he said. “You need tolerance for pain to navigate all of that early on. Your company is like a newborn, and you need a strong enough defense mechanism that it doesn’t die, because the world is going to throw everything at it.”

The second is treating a business as a hypothesis stack: figuring out which piece of the story needs to be proven true first, with the limited capital available, rather than trying to prove everything at once. “You need to understand what is the most groundbreaking piece of risk you need to address to prove to other people that this is real,” he said. “Combined with the pain tolerance to get through it, that’s what lets you build on top of it.”

Where Roohi sees healthcare going

Healthcare is one of the largest segments of the US economy, and Roohi sees Blooming Health’s mission tied directly to how well that system functions overall. The current model needs to shift from fee-for-service toward value-based care, and from reactive to proactive.

Most people miss annual checkups and preventive care not because they don’t want to, but because of unresolved friction underneath it. No ride to the appointment. A child to look after. Fear of what a diagnosis might mean for their ability to work. Left unaddressed, that friction turns into the catastrophic, expensive outcomes healthcare spends the most money reacting to.

“AI can make that happen at a fraction of the cost,” he said — automation paired with human care management teams, reaching patient populations at a scale no health plan or health system could staff for on its own. “We want to make sure care is accessible to everybody, no matter where they live, what language they speak, or their socioeconomic status.”

Social care wasn’t a category most investors had been pitched before. Unfamiliar isn’t the same as unreal. What got Blooming Health through 100 rejections and out the other side was the kind of grit that turns a founder into a cockroach — the ones who simply will not die. And America is already living healthier because of it.

Blooming Health is a Forum Ventures portfolio company. Learn more about how Forum supports early-stage founders at forumvc.com.