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.

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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 navigating the same system from a completely different position. The clinical care was there. The coordination around it was not. Food, transportation, housing, the benefits that determine whether someone can actually follow through on a treatment plan — those were invisible to the health system, and the gap between what the system knew and what the patient actually needed was everywhere.

That experience became the founding thesis of Blooming Health.

The $85 Billion Problem Nobody Was Solving

The social determinants of health — the food someone eats, whether they have stable housing, whether they can get to an appointment — account for roughly 80 percent of health outcomes. The clinical system addresses about 20 percent. The gap between those two numbers is where people fall through.

Roohi and his co-founder Sasha Abramsky built Blooming Health to close it. The platform connects health systems, health plans, and government agencies to the community organizations that provide food assistance, housing support, transportation, and social benefits. Instead of a care coordinator keeping a spreadsheet of local nonprofits and making phone calls, Blooming Health automates the referral, tracks whether the intervention happened, and feeds outcomes back to the clinical team.

The social care market is large — over $85 billion in managed care spending touches it — and deeply fragmented. Roohi knew that from the data side. What he did not fully anticipate was how hard it would be to convince investors that a founder from pharma data science, building infrastructure for community health organizations, was the right bet at the right time.

How the Pandemic Forced the First Version

Blooming Health launched in 2020. The timing was not chosen — it was forced. The pandemic collapsed the informal referral networks that community organizations depended on. Phone lines were overwhelmed. Volunteers disappeared. The organizations that had been connecting people to services could no longer operate the way they had.

Roohi and Abramsky launched on $200,000 — a number that required the kind of discipline most founders only develop after spending too much too fast. They built the core workflow: intake, referral, tracking, outcome. They got it in front of community organizations that were desperate for anything that worked. The first partners signed on not because the product was perfect but because the problem was urgent and they had nothing else.

That early pressure shaped the product. Blooming Health was built to be used by people whose job was not software — case managers at county agencies, volunteers at food banks, coordinators at community health workers. It had to be simple enough to work on a phone in the field, and it had to connect to systems those organizations already used. The cockroach instinct — survive on as little as possible, adapt to whatever the environment requires — was not a strategy. It was a necessity.

More Than 100 Investor Rejections

The fundraising history of Blooming Health is a study in persistence. More than 100 investors said no before the first institutional check came in.

The rejections followed a pattern. Social care was not a category investors recognized. The customers — government agencies, health plans, community organizations — had long sales cycles and procurement processes that made venture timelines feel misaligned. The problem was real and well-documented, but it did not map neatly onto the SaaS metrics most investors were pattern-matching against.

Forum Ventures wrote the first check — $100,000 — when the company was still early and the category was still being explained to most of the market. That check mattered less for the capital than for what it signaled to other investors: someone with pattern recognition in early B2B had looked at this team and said yes.

The subsequent rounds were still hard. But the team kept building, kept closing partners, and kept accumulating the kind of evidence — utilization rates, health outcomes data, government contracts — that eventually made the story impossible to dismiss. The $26 million Series A, led by Insight Partners, closed after the platform had reached millions of people and built a network of partners that covered 25 states.

What Forum Ventures Provides Early-Stage Founders

Roohi is direct about what the Forum relationship meant in practice. The capital was part of it. The more important part was being inside a network of founders who were navigating the same problems at the same stage — fundraising timelines, early customer conversations, how to prioritize when resources are minimal.

For a founder whose background was enterprise data science rather than startup operations, that peer network filled gaps that a technical co-founder or a strong product instinct could not. The questions that felt embarrassing to ask an investor could be asked of another founder who had just figured out the same thing six months earlier.

Where the Platform Stands Today

Blooming Health now reaches close to 7 million people across 25 states. The partner network includes more than 2,500 organizations — government agencies, health systems, health plans, and community organizations. The platform handles the full workflow: screening for social needs, connecting people to the right resources, tracking whether the intervention was completed, and reporting outcomes back to the clinical and administrative systems that need that data for value-based care contracts and regulatory compliance.

The Series A is funding expansion — more states, more health system partnerships, and deeper integration with the electronic health record systems that anchor clinical care. The goal is to make the social care referral as routine and as trackable as a lab order.

Advice for Founders Earlier in the Journey

Roohi offers two things to founders who are where he was in 2020. The first is to find the problem that will not leave you alone — the one you understand from the inside, that you have seen fail in ways others have not. The second is to not confuse investor interest with market validation. More than 100 investors said no. The market said yes every time a community organization renewed.

The checks that eventually came were not the result of a better pitch. They were the result of more evidence, more partners, and a category that had become harder to ignore.

Blooming Health is still building. The social care gap did not start in 2020 and it will not close quickly. But the platform now has the scale, the partners, and the capital to keep closing it — one referral, one connection, one completed intervention at a time.