Coming out of college at Duke, I studied Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering with the intention of designing medical devices as a career path. It seemed only natural to me at the time given my working experience with Stryker and the exciting process of building tools that can meaningfully impact people’s lives.
However, that summer I ended up interning for a startup called VersaMe, which had created a wearable word-counting device for babies that promoted early language and neural development. It was my first time working at a startup and I fell in love with the creative and fast-paced nature of the day-to-day as well as the close team dynamic, not to mention the growth that came with building a company let alone a single product. It was during my time at VersaMe that I learned about VFA (given one of the employees at the time was a Fellow) and realized that this Fellowship would be the perfect way to pivot into entrepreneurship.
After applying and getting into VFA, I immediately felt a sense of belonging with the incredible community of ambitious, like-minded, empathetic, and socially conscious individuals who all were in some way shape, or form aiming to utilize entrepreneurship as a lever to drive societal change. I still have fond memories of Training Camp in 2017 where we spent six weeks together in Rhode Island bonding across shared interests and values while learning important entrepreneurial skills. I’m very thankful to be a part of the VFAm – which continues to be an integral part of my personal and professional networks – and this community in many ways was my inspiration to one day start my own company.
Post-Training Camp, I spent the majority of my Fellowship years in Philadelphia as the first growth hire at a company called Roundtrip Health, which had built a healthcare transportation platform to ensure patients get to and from their appointments and not miss out on their medical care. It was truly an exhilarating journey being able to drive better patient outcomes with each ride we coordinated, and I saw the company grow from a small team in a WeWork office to one of the fastest-growing companies in Philadelphia with five times the number of employees in a few years that generated millions in revenue.
Then during COVID, as is typical of many VFA Fellows, I started searching for interesting side projects outside of work and reconnected with one of my good friends, Jaya Pokuri, whom I had met in college. He and I were in similar places in our careers having worked for startups, and realized we shared a vision and passion for two spaces in particular: healthcare and data. After weeks of brainstorming and working through our potential ideas, we settled on creating a sophisticated sales intelligence platform that uses AI to help healthtech companies sell more effectively to healthcare providers. We even used the VFA SpaT challenge as a way to de-risk our business idea and systematically work through customer discovery.
Finally, in late 2022, Jaya and I decided to take the plunge and go full-time with the business which we decided to name Bonfire Analytics. Since then, it has been a whirlwind of a journey as we launched our product, graduated from the leading enterprise accelerator in Alchemist as one of the top companies, landed several paying customers, and raised substantial funding from high-value angel investors, acclaimed venture capital funds, as well as VFA. We’re grateful to be here but more excited for what’s to come so we can continue to make the VFAm proud!