Better Serving Patients Starts with Less Time in Spreadsheets: Why We’re Backing Vitalize

Ask anyone in healthcare why they entered the profession, and you probably won’t hear scheduling, timekeeping, or payroll upkeep. Step into a hospital today, and you’ll see it’s the majority of their job. Clinical managers spend countless hours building staffing plans in Excel, only to rework them daily around the unpredictable ebbs and flows of patient volumes, sick calls, and more. With the U.S. healthcare labor market already under severe strain, these inefficiencies eat into hospital margins, limit patient capacity, and pull managers away from supporting the staff who deliver patient care.

The financial and personal consequences of complicated logistical work add up quickly. According to the American Hospital Association, labor accounts for about 60% of the average hospital’s expenses, and hospitals spent more than $1 trillion on their workforce in 2025 – contract staff alone added up to roughly $51 billion spent in 2023. In healthcare, workforce is the key to operational success – even small gains in efficiency are incredibly meaningful.

Today, Norwest is proud to share our investment in Vitalize Care’s $31M Series A, led by Oak HC/FT. Vitalize Care is the labor operating system for healthcare – the company’s product works like an always-on “air traffic control” system for the healthcare workforce, coordinating scheduling, staffing, and patient capacity across US healthcare.

Understaffed units mean heavier workloads that cause burnout. In fact, RN turnover averaged 18.4% in 2023. Stronger staffing capacity ensures caregivers are well supported during their shifts and ensures health systems can serve more patients. Vitalize’s platform replaces manual workflows and static tools with an AI-native platform that forecasts demand, predicts staffing gaps, and dynamically balances coverage across acute and ambulatory care.

The product seamlessly integrates with EMR, timekeeping, and payroll systems to fit within existing infrastructure.

CEO Veeraj Shah started building hospital operations software when he was only 14 years old. He then pursued an MD/PhD as a Gates Scholar and ultimately founded Vitalize with Sanketh Andhavarapu.

Initially, the company targeted solving clinician burnout by building a mental health platform, but time and time again, the founders could not shake the true cause of clinician frustration – manual staffing and labor operations, which had a clear and unfortunately measurable impact on clinician turnover and dissatisfaction. Instead of addressing the symptoms caused by an inflexible system, Veeraj and Sanketh decided to directly treat the source and set out to build the workforce optimization and automation platform of the future.

For six months, Veeraj and Sanketh basically lived on the nursing floor at customer and prospect sites, absorbing the tribal knowledge around staffing and building their own mental framework. Many nights, they worked on the units and staffing command centers themselves to deeply understand the complexity. Fast forward to today, unit managers spend 70% less time on staffing and scheduling and health systems using Vitalize have cut premium labor costs by more than 40% within a matter of months.

We first connected with the Vitalize team in 2025, after an angel investor learned about our thematic interest in improving the workforce management layer for health systems. They pointed us to Vitalize, one of the strongest-performing companies in their portfolio, and specifically to co-founders Veeraj and Sanketh as one of the most customer-obsessed, action-oriented founders in their portfolio. Veeraj and Suraj initially bonded over their shared last name, but in all seriousness, truly bonded about the shared need for an orchestration layer that allows clinicians to do their best work.

From our earliest conversations, we understood why this company was special. Veeraj and Sanketh brought a level of customer insight, technical depth, and operational maturity that stood out. They were repeatedly closing 7-Figure ARR deals in a matter of months, and taking weeks to deploy. Ultimately, they had immersed themselves in the day-to-day realities of health systems and were translating those insights into a product that addressed one of healthcare’s most persistent operational challenges.

We’re proud to support Vitalize alongside Oak HC/FT and existing investors MemorialCare, Y Combinator, Constellation Ventures, .406 Ventures, and Rock Health. We’re excited to support them in growing the team (hint, they’re hiring!), advancing conversations with leading health systems, and scaling the platform help unlock healthcare’s full capacity.