The best companies are usually built inside problems everyone has learned to live with. In healthcare, no problem is more universally tolerated, despite the cost, than how hospitals staff and schedule their clinical workforce. It is one of the largest line items on every health system P&L, yet it still runs on spreadsheets, group texts, and heroics. Vitalize is rebuilding it from the ground up, and we're proud to announce that Oak HC/FT is leading the company's $31 million Series A.
A $50 Billion Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
Premium labor, which includes overtime, incentive pay, and agency nursing, costs U.S. health systems an estimated $50 billion a year. Individual systems burn $20 million to $100 million annually, much of it because the process for deploying clinical staff is broken.
Walk into almost any hospital today and you'll find schedules built on 3-to-6-week blocks in Excel, central staffing offices of 30 to 100+ FTEs running manual operations, and clinical managers spending up to two hours a day on staffing instead of patients. Demand changes hourly – call-outs, census swings, acuity shifts – but the response is stuck a decade behind, relying on emergency texts, $1,000 shift bonuses, and agency fills at 1.3x to 2.5x base rates. CFOs feel it in premium labor spend. CNOs feel it in burnout and turnover, where scheduling dissatisfaction is one of the strongest predictors of a nurse walking out the door.
The incumbents haven't solved this because they were never built to. Payroll vendors stay in payroll, EHRs stay in clinical workflows, physician scheduling stays with physicians. The result is a massive, urgent, board-level pain point that is still effectively greenfield.
A System of Action, Not a System of Record
Vitalize has built the air traffic control layer for health system labor. The company’s AI platform unifies staffing, scheduling, patient flow, and capacity in a single platform for systems. It ingests the supply side (skills, FTE status, labor cost, union, and HR rules) and the demand side (real-time census, acuity, and ADT events) to compute the most cost-effective staffing configuration for every unit, every shift. Three things set it apart:
- It executes, it doesn't just recommend. Vitalize automates the vast majority of schedule generation and shift filling. But, its real wedge is the day-of, real-time staff reallocations where premium labor dollars actually leak. Every recommendation ships with its decision rationale and one-click execution, pushing updates straight through to staff apps, time and attendance and payroll. That end-to-end loop is what makes Vitalize a sticky system of action.
- It lives in the daily workflow. Unit leaders, central staffing offices and frontline clinicians all run on the same platform, with near-universal daily usage among managers at live sites. Nurses self-schedule and swap shifts within guardrails that automatically enforce hospital policy and union rules. Every decision flowing through the platform compounds into a proprietary dataset of staffing preferences, decisions, and outcomes. What’s particularly compelling is that the data moat for Vitalize gets harder to replicate with every go-live.
- Time-to-value measured in weeks, not quarters. Implementations that took six months in 2024 now take a matter of weeks for the company. One recent customer went from signature to go-live in under 60 days. The ROI is hard-dollar and fast. One early deployment delivered more than 2x its targeted savings and customers consistently underwrite 10-20% reductions in premium labor spend.
This combination of quantifiable ROI, rapid deployment and a product clinicians genuinely love is driving the growth for Vitalize, despite its brief time in market. The company now serves nine health systems across 37 hospitals and roughly 40,000 covered staff, helping to manage roles from inpatient nursing to OR, procedural, and ambulatory settings.
Earned Insight, Exceptional Velocity
We back founders with earned insight into their markets, and Veeraj Shah has it in spades. Before founding YC-backed Vitalize, he worked inside health systems large and small. He understands hospital staffing workflows, sells with the credibility of someone who has lived the problem and has built trusted relationships with nursing and operational leaders across the country. What stands out most is his rate of learning. He has the unique combination of coachability, self-awareness and tenacity – the trait we've seen most reliably separate good founders from generational ones. Alongside him is co-founder and COO Sanketh Andhavarapu, a decisive operator who built Vitalize's deployment and customer operations engine – the machine generating feedback like "the best software implementation I've seen in 30 years of nursing." Together they've assembled a mission-driven team that ships at a pace this category has never seen.
Our conviction is simple. The people delivering care deserve operational infrastructure as sophisticated as the medicine they practice. When staffing works, everyone wins. CFOs cut waste, nurses get schedules that respect their lives and patients get safer care. Vitalize is becoming the operating system for healthcare workforce operations, and we're thrilled to partner with Veeraj, Sanketh, and the entire team for the journey ahead.
