Karuna Health

What We Do

Karuna's software allows patients to stay in touch with their care teams using the same channels they use with friends and family: from Whatsapp and text messaging to voice calls and video. To handle the increased volume and quality of engagement, our automation tools help care teams prioritize, measure their performance, and cut through back office work so that they can focus on doing what they do best: building authentic relationships with the patients who need them most.

Our focus today is on care management, a niche part of the healthcare ecosystem dedicated to serving the most vulnerable and sickest members of our communities. In the future, we will enable healthcare organizations to build deeper, more impactful relationships with every patient, while also helping them expand the scope and accessibility of their services for all.

How We Interview & Hire

Our interview process begins with an intro call to help you better understand the opportunity, give us a glimpse into your interests and motivations, and help you decide if Karuna is the right place for you to be your happiest and most successful self. After that, we've designed a coding challenge to give you a glimpse into our tech stack and show us how you think about solving novel problems. Next, you'll have the chance to talk with some of our team members (and, if you'd like, some of our advisors and investors) to ask questions and get an unbiased look at what things are like on the ground. We work hard to be transparent about compensation, equity, and impact during the process so feel free to reach out if you have questions at any point!

Our Story

In 2013, one of our founders (Joe) got seriously ill. This is our story in his own words.

Practically overnight, I went from being an active and outdoorsy teen to losing weight, struggling to eat, and falling into a deep depression.

More than anything, being a patient is lonely. It’s hard not to feel helpless and isolated in a system that sometimes functions more like a factory line than a place of healing.

When Yasyf and I met in 2015 through Dorm Room Fund, a student-run venture capital firm backed by First Round Capital, it was intriguing to compare our experiences. His parents were clinicians in a rural part of Canada. Mine were 36 hours away in South Africa.

The level of care that Yasyf’s mum and dad provided to their patients was unlike anything I’d experienced. At the core of the patient’s journey was her relationship with the care team. As we reflected on the years that I’d been at my worst, Yasyf and I both realized that having some sort of “guide” in the healthcare system could have been life-changing for me.

Our friendship had been an incredible source of support. But what if Yasyf and I were friends and he understood how the healthcare system worked and could advocate for me? Just like his parents did for their patients back home?

In mid 2017, we started to explore what it would mean to give every patient a “guide” in the healthcare system.

We soon came across care management teams. Care managers are these deeply skilled, empathetic healthcare workers matched with vulnerable patients to support them along their journeys. As we interviewed leaders in the field, we quickly realized that care managers were operating at a fraction of their potential impact and capacity—largely due to a lack of modern software to support their work.

One year later we’re building a platform that we believe will not only help care managers have a deeper impact with the patients they already serve but also so fundamentally increase their capacity that they can become the primary interface for every patient with the healthcare system.

If you want to build towards a world in which no patient has to feel alone or lost in the healthcare system and if you’re driven by a deep desire to help others, reach out to us at founders@meetkaruna.com and we’ll find a way to work together.

Onwards,

Joe and Yasyf