Ray Costantini, MD, MBA

Backstory

My shift from practicing clinician to digital health came at Providence, where I built and led the digital health function across both the health plan and the delivery system — one of the country's largest integrated health systems.

Leading inside both a health plan and a provider medical group taught me that stakeholder alignment in healthcare is far from a given. It has to be built deliberately. A solution that only pencils out for one side rarely survives contact with the real system.

I left Providence to co-found Bright.md and led it through the whole venture arc. I raised more than $30M to build and scale an award winning “virtual medical resident” platform that empowered providers at major health systems across the country, including 5 of the 10 largest not-for-profits, to go from seeing 20 patients a day to more than 200, without sacrificing quality or increasing provider burnout. Our acquisition by Cigna Evernorth is proof that it's possible to change the economics of care delivery at scale. And the scars along the way taught me that friction at any step — sales, onboarding, workflow, adoption support — needs to be addressed. Underestimating that can quietly kill adoption, no matter how much value potential there is underneath it.

That experience shapes how I invest — and it's the same lens I've applied building Care Nimble, where getting the stakeholder economics and incentives right for referring providers, payers, and patients has been as important as the clinical model itself. Knowing exactly who your stakeholders are, and what they'll actually pay for, isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a solution that scales and one that doesn't.

The thesis behind two of my companies has been the same: there's more than enough clinician capacity if we stop wasting so much of it on overhead activities that don't improve outcomes or patient experience. The system isn't short on doctors so much as it's short on leverage.

What I'm looking for

Earned credibility matters more to me than a polished pitch: I'd rather back someone who's been in the room with the patient than someone who's only modeled the problem from the outside.

I look for founders who understand, firsthand, where healthcare resources are wasted on overhead instead of outcomes — and who have the operational discipline to build something that scales inside a system this convoluted, not just something that would work in a simpler one. If the incentives don't line up, I want to know how you'll address that, not just that the pain is real.