January 31, 2025

Here’s How This Startup Uses AI To Help Families With Long-Term Care Costs

Lily Vittayarukskul founder of Waterlily

A San Francisco startup, Waterlily, is using AI to simplify long-term care planning and costs. Founded in 2021 by Lily Vittayarukskul, the company was born out of personal hardship—her aunt’s terminal colon cancer diagnosis left the family struggling with overwhelming medical costs.

“It wiped us out financially,” Vittayarukskul, a former NASA data scientist, told TechCrunch. At the time, she was studying aerospace engineering, but the emotional and financial toll of her aunt’s illness led her to pivot to genetic and data science, ultimately inspiring Waterlily’s mission.

How does Waterlily help individuals with long-term care costs and planning?

Waterlily helps individuals with long-term care options by giving users funding plans and modeling costs. It seeks to make the process smoother for financial advisors and insurance agents so they can advise the right financial products based on a family’s predicted long-term care needs.

Vittayarukskul explains that most people start thinking about long-term care when they’re around 65 and 70 or just before they need care. But, this is usually too late in several cases.

The company uses artificial intelligence to predict a family’s cost of long-term care needs and then advises them to create a care plan and examine the best way to pay for the expenses. It does this by drawing from over 500 million data points and machine learning algorithms utilizing its AI modeling software to personalize care and cost predictions and foresee the “when,” “how,” and “how much” of an individual’s possible long-term care needs.

The app can be used by any individual over the age of 40.

Securing $7 million in seed funding

The startup raised $7 million in seed funding led by John Kim, founding partner of Brewer Lane Ventures. It also secured strategic investments from Genworth, Nationwide, and Edward Jones. Previously, Waterlily raised a $2.2 million pre-seed round from investors like Scott Barclay, managing director of healthcare at Insight Partners.

It hopes to use the funding to expand its engineering data science and enterprise management teams while building on its AI models and data partnerships. Additionally, it intends to grow its sales and marketing initiatives. They currently have nine full-time employees as well as some contractors.

Waterlily would like to extend its business to those with disabilities, critical illnesses, hospital indemnity, and Medicare planning, or “really any area where advanced predictive modeling would help families make better life and health coverage decisions,” Vittayarukskul adds.


Image: Waterlily

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Habiba Katsha

Habiba Katsha is a journalist and writer who specializes in writing about race, gender, and the internet. She is currently a tech reporter at POCIT.