Ulupreneur Amee Devani’s path to entrepreneurship feels both inevitable and hard-won. Her Indian grandparents immigrated to Kenya and, with few options, built businesses from the ground up—an origin story that shaped her sense that starting something isn’t just a career choice, it’s part of her DNA.
After earning her undergraduate degree at Cambridge, Amee joined her first startup in London. She later enrolled at Stanford GSB, where an unexpected moment on a cycling training ride changed everything: she heard a teammate speaking Swahili. When she greeted him in his native language, Pascal Odek was stunned—and the two quickly connected. They knew they wanted to build a company together, and began exploring ideas, drawn especially to healthcare after both had watched their mothers endure major medical issues.
After grad school, they took different jobs—Pascal went to GoFundMe and Amee to Palantir—but kept meeting at night to workshop ideas and interview doctors and nurses. Their early “brilliant” concepts were routinely dismissed as not real problems in practice, which forced them to stop selling and start listening. That discovery process led them to post-acute care, where communication between home-care nurses and hospital providers often breaks down and key information gets lost across faxes, emails, and phone calls. In 2019, they launched WellBeam, a platform designed to streamline that communication so health systems save time and money and patients experience smoother, more efficient care.
Neither of you have experience in the healthcare space—do you have tips for founders who want to build something that’s not part of their background?
We thought we had unique, great ideas, but doctors and nurses consistently told us they weren’t real problems in healthcare.
“That was the turning point: we started listening instead of pitching, and we found needs that were repeated across many conversations. Testing and validation became everything.”
We also learned to distinguish the user from the buyer, because it can’t be validated only at the user level—you need buyer-level validation too, including confirming willingness to pay. If you invest that time upfront, you save yourself a lot of pivots later.
What have been your biggest challenges?
Selling to hospitals and health systems has meant long sales cycles, and that can be brutal because you can work relentlessly and still not see results quickly. It tests your belief in product-market fit and forces you to manage costs carefully so you can last long enough to reach the point where traction truly changes. For us it was a slow process for about two years before momentum picked up. On a personal level, I also got married and became a mom while running the company, and that adds a layer of challenge that comes with real sacrifice.
How does AI play into your business?
We apply AI internally in how we operate, especially within engineering and coding. More broadly, healthcare is at an inflection point where AI can help shift the industry because there have historically been bottlenecks in moving data between systems—often due to limited integration capacity inside hospital teams.
“When patients move between care settings, their data has tended to lag behind them, creating frustration and making analysis difficult.”
As data starts to move more effectively across systems, the opportunity to improve care becomes much larger, and AI is helping drive that change. It’s aligned with our mission.
What have been your recent milestones?
We raised a $10M Series A and have announced several major commercial partnerships. We’ve recently gone live with a large, multi-state health system based in the Pacific Northwest, and we’re working with systems like Advocate Atrium based out of North Carolina and a large health system based in Southern California.
What are your dreams for WellBeam?
We want to give healthcare better tools for longitudinal patient care, so that as patients move through settings—like from inpatient care to home health or hospice—their data moves with them. Today, patients transition across that continuum, but their information often doesn’t flow, which makes it hard to deliver the right care at the right time. The dream is interoperability that feels natural: wherever you’re being treated, your data should follow smoothly so providers can make better, faster clinical decisions.
