I come from a healthcare operations and investing background, and my co-founder Kevin Bailey is a 2x founder and former engineer at Uber. We started Understood Care in March 2025 because millions of Medicare patients, eg. seniors and people with disabilities, weren't getting the care they needed, not for lack of better treatments, but because the system was too complex to navigate. The timing was right: new CMS regulations made advocacy reimbursable and affordable to patients, and rapid advances in AI meant we could finally deliver advocacy at scale.

There's a long list of non-clinical reasons patients can't access care such as inadequate housing, food insecurity, lack of transportation, poor care coordination. We match every patient with a dedicated, compassionate advocate who works with them one-on-one to resolve their specific problems. Behind the scenes, our AI assistant Ava handles the administrative burden - transcribing and summarizing calls, drafting faxes, emails, and texts, finding relevant resources, and generating compliant documentation - so advocates can focus on the patients. Most patients pay $0 out of pocket.

Tau has been genuinely collaborative from the start. The team has been extremely generous with introductions, and honest and easy to work with. That kind of relationship is what makes a big difference as we scale.