Kinetic

Sufi Choudhury wasn't looking to build a healthcare company. In 2016, he was working on a navigation product for traffic when an old friend called asking for help with a database problem. The friend ran a local transport company in Brooklyn that provided rides for Medicaid patients to medical appointments. What Sufi found in that back office was stunning: a sprawling, unmanageable Excel spreadsheet tracking hundreds of rides per week. But the spreadsheet was just the symptom. The real problem was systemic: drivers waited to be paid by the company every 7 days (forcing them to take loans), while the company itself waited 60 days to get reimbursed by insurance. Growing up in a low-income family on Medicaid, Sufi felt an immediate pull to fix this broken system.

Sufi dropped his original project and dove in with two co-founders, Atif and Mahboob. For 12 months, the three of them camped out in the back offices of transport companies, observing every detail of how the business actually worked. Then they spent the next 18 months building. They integrated with 3,100 payers and created the nation's first revenue cycle management platform for non-emergency medical transportation—cutting payment time from 60 days to 21 days and automating medical billing that used to take 40 hours per week in just 30 minutes.

But there was a catch: they'd built the first six months with only their friend as a customer, creating a hyper-customized product that was useless for anyone else. Sufi burned through $80,000 of his own money before realizing they'd built the wrong thing. They had to start over, this time actually talking to a dozen transport companies before building a standardized product.

From 2018-2020, Sufi sold through relentless in-person outreach. He flew across America—to Oklahoma, Buffalo, rural communities—meeting mom-and-pop transport companies who had never adopted technology and weren't about to start over a phone call. These weren't price-sensitive businesses; they were ideologically resistant to change. Sufi had to sell vision, not features. "You can't sell over the phone," he explained. "You've got to be there. You've got to show them you believe in it." By early 2020, they had about 35 customers.

Then COVID hit and 70% of their customer base either went out of business or stopped taking rides.

Instead of shutting down, Sufi made a bold pivot. In Q2 2020, he decided to expand the vision from just payments to a full platform serving health plans and health systems with both scheduling and payments. This meant building out a 20-person tech team and raising capital to support a $3B TAM instead of a $150M niche. The bet paid off in unexpected ways: brokers who knew Kinetic's tech started putting the company's name into health plan RFPs without Sufi's knowledge. When one major health plan discovered Kinetic was already being used by their brokers, they called and asked why they weren't talking directly to Kinetic instead. This led to a massive multi-year, eight-figure contract—and entirely changed the trajectory.

Sufi doubled down on sales, building a 12-person outbound team. By the end of 2022 (five years after founding), they hit $1M ARR. By 2023, they had grown to 250+ customers and were on track to cross $8M ARR. Today, over 7 million rides per year flow through their platform.

Kinetic now operates as a two-sided marketplace: charging transport companies for RCM/payments and health plans for scheduling. Sales cycles vary from one month (transport companies) to two years (national MCOs). The company employs nearly 100 people across the US, Bangladesh, and Serbia. Sufi's big-picture vision extends beyond transportation—eventually including durable medical equipment, pharmacy delivery, and physician house calls, all powered by the same digital network and payment infrastructure. The kid who grew up on Medicaid and saw his community struggle to access medical care is now building the infrastructure to fix it at scale.