Vertical Velocity started as AIBoomi’s first cross-border immersion program, a bet that Indian founders building AI startups for the US healthcare market could compress months of learning into two intensive weeks in the Bay Area.
If I had to summarize Cohort 1 in two words: belief and belonging.
Which, as it turned out, were the two things nobody told me the program would actually be about.
How it started
It was May 2025, Avinash pinged me with a concept note and said, “Can you look through this and tell me what you think?” The idea: take a small cohort of Indian founders, give them two intensive weeks in the Bay Area, the right mentors, the right conversations, and send them back with actual clarity instead of just conference energy.
I was in the middle of evaluating startup ideas myself at that point, and I knew exactly how long it takes to get the right insights when you’re sitting several time zones away from your target market. I said yes, and that yes changed a lot more than I expected.
Building something that didn’t exist yet
The honest version of this story is that we were throwing darts in the dark for a long time, until it hit bullseye.
Dev and Avinash had the vision and the conviction, and those two things were the north star throughout everything that followed. As the program’s founding visionary, Dev anchored us to what we were actually trying to do for these founders, not just what looked good on paper. He shared his network generously, opened doors we couldn’t have opened ourselves, and was on a call with us nearly every week asking what was working, what wasn’t, and how he could help. That helped us push the program through the darkness with belief.
While Dev was our navigator, Avinash played the role of commander, assembling the right crew and keeping up the momentum. And what a crew that was!
Aneesh helped us narrow the focus to healthcare early, which gave the whole thing a spine. Anubhav, Anshuman, Laxman, Vipul, and Varun brought great ideas from the earliest planning phases. Keerthi, Aishwarya, and Sandeep kept everything that needed to function, functioning. Eventually, Vivek and Vengat, who were building in this exact space joined as mission specialists, and helped shape the content and cohort. Because they had real skin in the game, every decision they pushed on was grounded in something real.
What I didn’t fully appreciate when I signed up was how much this would feel like building an early-stage startup. The questions don’t have clean answers. You’re placing bets and adjusting as you go. The beauty of having a volunteer team built almost entirely of founders is that this is familiar territory for everyone. We’re wired for uncertainty. We just kept showing up, and led with belief.
Vertical Velocity was a pay-it-forward program from the start. Every mentor and speaker gave their time freely, because that’s how the AIBoomi community works. Many of them had never heard of AIBoomi before we reached out. Their first introduction to the community was through this program. We weren’t sure how that would work out. What followed were weeks of calls: introductions, orientation conversations, schedule chasing, confirmation follow-ups, trying to get the right people in the right slots. It was the organizing equivalent of a pre-revenue startup: a lot of effort with no guarantee of outcome.
By Aug, we finally had our 12 startups ready to go. One piece of the puzzle cleared. But we were not out of the weeds yet.
What would the days look like? Who exactly would they be meeting? We were still waiting on confirmations ourselves.
I had nothing concrete to give them. So I led with the only thing I had: honesty. I told them we’re doing this for the first time too. We don’t have all the answers yet. But we’ll make it worth it. I asked them to believe. In the organizing crew, in the community spirit.
All 12 startups said yes. That still means a lot to me.
It’s not unlike how that first advisor takes a bet on a startup, or when the first design partner agrees to try a product that isn’t finished yet. These founders were our first customers, and they chose to believe before they had proof.
A couple of weeks before we were supposed to travel, everything finally fell into place. The itinerary locked. The confirmations landed. And the whole thing that came after was only possible because this cohort believed in us.
The week itself
We kicked off September 29th at Dev’s place in San Francisco, 12 founders who had flown in from India for a program that barely had a confirmed agenda two weeks earlier.
The first 30min had that careful energy that any room of strangers who are also potential collaborators tends to carry. Professional, warm, but measured. Then Vivek suggested something that shifted the room: he asked everyone to share what they do outside of building companies. Not the pitch, not the traction, just who are you when you’re not working?
And that’s when something amazing happened. Founders started talking about hiking, gaming, books, fitness, sketching, the things you forget other people also love when you’ve been building alone for too long. We stopped being startups in a room and became friends at dinner. By the time we were heading out, some of the pre-arranged rides were quietly cancelled. People who had known each other only for 3 hours decided to carpool. That’s a small detail but it was the first visible sign of what this cohort was going to become about – belonging.
The programming at Draper University was intense and diverse in topics.
One set of sessions focused on the big picture: regulatory experts, healthcare policy professionals, lawyers, compliance specialists, and one of the most senior procurement leaders at a large US hospital system who sat with the cohort for half an hour and answered their questions with no filter, which is genuinely rare access for a group this early stage.
Another set went tactical, covering how AI is actually being adopted in clinical workflows, the economics of healthcare data, and what integration with large health systems really looks like. This included a session at Stanford with a researcher at the intersection of AI and biomedical data, and a visit to a growing AI startup’s office in Redwood City where founders got to ask the CEO and medical lead directly how they built what they built.
The third set was founder journeys, the candid kind, people who had built and scaled companies in US healthcare talking about what they’d actually do differently, over hikes and meals.
The evenings were where the friendships bloomed. We had a planned informal dinner mid-week, and it was so fun that nobody wanted it to end. Thursday was Thai food, and after that nobody was asking if people wanted to come, everyone just showed up and hung out together.
What I’ll never forget: when any founder had to step out mid-session to check in with their team, someone else in the room was already taking notes for them. That’s not something you can plan for.
Saturday morning everyone went for a hike and breakfast together, and then we all went into Caravan, SaaSBoomi’s flagship US event. If you were there, you would have found the Vertical Velocity gang in one corner having lunch together, debriefing everything they’d absorbed.
I’m not a healthcare founder. But I was there for every session, every dinner, every walk to the coffee shop. And watching those 12 founders on the last day, knowing they were about to get on flights back to India: the market wasn’t abstract for them anymore. They were flying home with notebooks and contacts, yes; but also with something harder to name: the feeling that what they’re trying to do is possible, because they’d now met people who had done it.
The conversations didn’t end when the week did. For weeks after everyone flew home, threads in the cohort group were still going, founders building on what they’d heard, asking each other for clarification, making introductions. The six months that followed were full of that: someone reaching out to a cohort founder at midnight, someone connecting two companies with a shared challenge, collaboration discussions that started at a session in Draper and turned into actual business. Being able to trust another founder building in the same vertical, speaking candidly within the group, knowing you can pick up the phone and someone will answer: that turned out to be the most durable thing the program built.
At the end, it was where they found belonging.
What we learned, and what comes next
There were things we promised that didn’t fully land: structured mentor touchpoints, OKR sessions, more formal follow-through after the immersion. The cohort was patient with us through that, and we took those notes seriously.
In many ways, they co-built this program with us. Now the prototype has been tested and it’s ready to become a product. We’re announcing the next cohort very soon.
To the Cohort 1 founders: Kashyap (Aarogram), Anuruddh (August AI), Tarun, Abhinav and Chaitanya (Carissa Health), Harsh, Krishna, Chaitanya and Prerna (Circle Health), Dilip, Vivek and Joshua (CogniSwitch), Mohit (Foss Health), Rathina, Sridher and Ajay (KraftX), Jofin, Nakul (Needletail AI), Sonia (Proto Health), Dhruv (Pype AI), Samyukktha (Supahealth AI), and Vengat (VoxyHealth), thank you for believing in us before we’d earned it.
To the volunteer crew, Dev, Avinash, Vivek, Vengat, Aneesh, Anshuman, Laxman, Vipul, Keerthi, Anubhav, Aishwarya, Varun, Sandeep: this took off because of you.
And for me, this entire experience was just – amaze amaze amaze! See you over breakfast again, friends. 🚀
