Joseph Kitonga

Vitable Health’s website calls him a first-generation immigrant from Kenya. In his own account his father was a teacher in Kenya; in another interview he said both of his parents had formerly been teachers.⁠[1][2][3]

He wrote in a post on his own Substack that his birthday is April 25. The ages printed in the press are: 23 in TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry on July 27, 2020 and again on October 21, 2020; 24 in Becker’s Hospital Review on December 1, 2021 and in The Philadelphia Inquirer on December 26, 2021; 24 in Kenyans.co.ke on March 15, 2022 and in Citizen Digital on March 16, 2022; 27 in CitigroupCitigroupCitigroup Inc. is a global diversified financial services holding company based in New York, with a history dating back to 1812.Open the full entry’s Q&A of July 29, 2024; and 28 in The Philadelphia Inquirer on May 21, 2025.⁠[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][3][11]

The Kenyan outlet Citizen Digital spelled his surname “Gitonga” in its article of March 16, 2022; Y Combinator’s founder page, Vitable Health’s website and his own Substack publication print “Kitonga.”⁠[10][12][1][13]

He moved from Kenya to the United States with his family when he was 13. In his founder bio at Y Combinator he wrote, “I immigrated from Kenya to Philadelphia at 13 when my family won the lottery,” and that his father cashed out his pension to buy the tickets. In the first-person piece published by MercuryMercury (fintech company)Mercury is an American fintech company founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher; it launched account services for businesses in 2019. Its platform combines financial services provided by partner banks with software for bills, invoices and expense management. Mercury itself remains a fintech company; the proposed Mercury Bank, N.A. should be distinguished from the current partner-bank model.Open the full entry he said his father cashed out his entire pension and bought one-way tickets for the family.⁠[14][2][3][8][15]

He said the family arrived “with suitcases, each other, and not much else” and that their first home was “a little basement apartment in the middle of inner-city Philadelphia”; in his Substack post he wrote of having lived “in a cramped basement with six members of my family, in one of the worst neighborhoods in PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry.” TechCrunch wrote in July 2020 that his parents had immigrated to the United States a decade earlier; Vitable Health’s website states that he grew up in Philadelphia.⁠[2][4][5][1]

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote in 2021 that his parents started Hosana Home Health Care, a company in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, in 2012; its 2025 article states that they founded the home health business in 2012, “not long after the family emigrated to the United States from Kenya.” Kenyans.co.ke’s article describes it as a business caring for elderly people who are often neglected by their families or have no caregivers. He said his parents grew the senior care agency from zero to a few hundred employees and that his mother ran a senior care agency with about 200 caregivers; MedCity News wrote that it grew to about 200 employees and caregivers. Vitable Health’s 2024 press release states that he helped his parents bootstrap the agency, and a podcast’s 2021 guest bio states that he helped them grow the business to a few hundred employees.⁠[8][11][9][3][15][16][17]

TechCrunch wrote in July 2020 that the caregivers made $10 an hour, too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to afford health insurance, and that uninsured workers who went to the emergency room put $1,300 in charges on their credit cards. In his account published by Mercury he said his parents tried to offer health coverage, but fewer than 10% opted in, and even with the employer covering half, a family plan could cost more than $1,000. Vitable Health’s company post on its $7.2 million round, written in his first person, states that the average health insurance plan costs more than $600 a month and that his parents paid the majority of the premium, yet more than 80% of their employees opted out because it was still too expensive. In MedCity News he is quoted as saying, “the caregivers made too much to qualify for Medicaid but too little for the Cadillac health insurance plan.”⁠[5][2][18][15]

He studied computer engineering at Pennsylvania State University; Technical.ly’s 2021 article describes him instead as a former computer science major there. He spent three summers interning at MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, which Citizen Digital’s article places between 2017 and 2019; a podcast’s guest bio states that he interned on Xbox. He said the large technology company gave him a zero-copay health plan with a clinic nearby, while the caregivers at his parents’ company had no health plan at all.⁠[8][11][19][10][17][3]

He said that average life expectancy differs by 20 years between two Philadelphia zip codes five miles apart and that access to quality primary care is a contributing factor. Vitable Health’s 2024 press release speaks of a 20-year difference between two neighborhoods less than 5 miles apart.⁠[3][15][16]

He said, “In fall of 2018, I built the tech product that would enable Vitable, found a lawyer, and applied to Inc.U.” The Inc.U Competition is an annual contest for student startups, launched in 2015 and managed by PennTAP in partnership with Invent Penn State and others. He described the original idea as “UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry for urgent care, where we’d bring the provider to you,” and said, “I didn’t know if Vitable Health was even possible”; he said the competition was taped the following semester, in what was “the first week we’d launched.”⁠[20][9][10][21]

He wrote in his Substack post that Vitable launched in Philadelphia in April 2019 as a service in which a customer called, paid $79 and had a nurse practitioner at home within two hours; at the time he was driving three hours each way from Philadelphia to State College four times a week for classes, and an early teammate quit because of health issues. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that he founded Vitable LLC in 2019 while studying at Pennsylvania State University.⁠[4][8][11]

The 2019 Inc.U Competition was taped at WPSU, and its finale aired as the program “The Investment” on WPSU-TV at 8 p.m. on May 16, 2019, with six student companies competing for up to $30,000: Purpose Therapy Box won $15,000, Vitable Health $10,000 and CastPak $5,000. Penn State’s article describes Vitable Health as a health care app and service that provides certified nurse practitioners for house calls. Citizen Digital’s article instead dates his $10,000 win to 2018, while he was at the university.⁠[21][10]

He said, “The $10,000 we got was monumental for me”: he had $5,000 in savings at the time, spent $2,000 on equipment and liability coverage, and the prize kept the company going for a year and let him hire a full-time sales representative.⁠[20]

On May 21, 2019, seven technology startups that had graduated from the spring TechCelerator@State College pitched to judges at Innovation Park in State College, and the judges split the $10,000 top prize, offered by Ben Franklin Technology Partners, between Chute and Vitable Health. That Penn State article calls him “a Penn State graduate in engineering” and describes Vitable Health as an on-demand urgent care service providing a nurse practitioner within an hour, then running a pilot in Philadelphia; other sources state that he left the university in January 2020 without graduating. He is quoted in it as saying, “Being able to focus on acquiring customers with companies doing the same thing drove me to succeed.” Another Invent Penn State article states that he is a graduate of the Happy Valley LaunchBox FastTrack Accelerator and received funding as an undergraduate from the Ben Franklin TechCelerator and the Inc.U Competition.⁠[22][23][8]

Looking back from his 2020 application, he wrote in his Substack post, “I’d had an interview for the summer batch each of the previous 2 years,” both of which had fallen on his birthday. For the Summer 2019 batch he recruited someone to apply with because he thought Y Combinator did not like solo founders; the co-founder quit days before the flight to San Francisco, he was asked in the interview, “Don’t you have a co-founder?”, and the application was rejected. He wrote that Aaron Epstein of Y Combinator afterwards sent a thoughtful email.⁠[4]

The same post states that in May 2019 his Microsoft internship was postponed to the fall and Vitable switched to subscriptions; he rented a kiosk at a local mall for a month and a half at $600 a month, where shoppers rarely signed up but the mall’s employees did, and he ran pop-up wellness clinics at WeWorkWeWorkWeWork is a flexible workspace company founded in New York in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. It provides private offices, coworking space, meeting rooms and enterprise workplace services. After withdrawing its IPO plan in 2019, it went public through a BowX merger in 2021, entered Chapter 11 in 2023 and emerged from restructuring in June 2024, continuing as a private company.Open the full entry locations in Philadelphia, where few tenants came but janitors and support staff enrolled. Churn was high because cards expired and members lost their jobs.⁠[4]

From August 2019 he spent three months in Seattle as an intern at Microsoft, working on a service on Xbox, with a contract sales representative on the ground in Philadelphia. He couch-surfed for the first month, for which he thanked Quentin, Arsala and Farabi, and then rented a place through AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry next to a golf course in Bellevue. He wrote that sales showed no real growth in those three months and that he spent his time learning golf instead of building; one roommate died of a heart attack, and the other gave him a set of golf clubs and taught him to swing. He accepted a full-time offer from Microsoft starting in April 2021, which gave him a year and a half.⁠[4]

In December 2019 he returned to Kenya for the first time in ten years, his first trip back since immigrating to Philadelphia.⁠[4]

In his Substack post he put it as “January: Take a sabbatical from school to focus on Vitable full time.” The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that he dropped out of Pennsylvania State University in January 2020 and turned down a software engineer position at Microsoft to concentrate on Vitable. Vitable Health’s 2024 press release states that he turned down the full-time Microsoft offer and left school at the age of 21. He said the company had one client covering fewer than 30 lives when he dropped out, and in the acknowledgments of his Substack post he thanked Microsoft, “Without whom, I would not have had the cash to drop out.”⁠[4][8][16][3][17]

He wrote that in January 2020 Vitable turned to employers of workers earning $10 to $15 an hour, replacing credit-card billing with payroll deduction to lower churn; he sold door to door, was chased out of many offices and reached $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and Dan joined part-time while still working at JPM. In February the pipeline centered on daycares and home-care providers, with few deals closed, monthly recurring revenue came close to $2,000, and he called the company “ramen profitable.”⁠[4][20]

After the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, a contract sales representative quit at the end of the month; employers urgently sought affordable coverage, and Vitable added in-home COVID tests for its members; he said the company tested all members free of charge and offered free rapid testing to front-line workers such as home care and restaurant workers. Conor joined as a business development intern and later became a sales representative. He wrote that revenue doubled in March and again in April and grew 80% in May, and that he had considered bootstrapping until Farabi talked him out of it.⁠[4][20]

He applied to Y Combinator again as a solo founder, weeks late and without recommendations, and prepared for the interview with Y Combinator alumni who had posted on Twitter. The interviews were virtual: the first, on April 26, 2020, the day after his birthday, was with Michael SeibelMichael SeibelMichael Seibel is an American entrepreneur and investor and a co-founder of Justin.tv (which became Twitch) and Socialcam. He led the Y Combinator startup accelerator from 2016 to 2024 and became a Partner Emeritus in March 2025. He has been a director of Reddit since June 2020 and a director of Dropbox since the same year.Open the full entry and three others, and he wrote that he remembered little of it; a second followed the next day with Aaron Epstein, Tim Brady and Kevin Lin. After he had gone out for a four-hour walk, Aaron Epstein called to say he was in. He summed the experience up as “3 years, 3 interviews, and 2 rejections.”⁠[4][20]

Y Combinator’s company page lists Vitable Health in the Summer 2020 batch with Aaron Epstein as primary partner. He wrote that it was Y Combinator’s first virtual batch, running from May to August 2020; during it Vitable shifted its focus from urgent-care memberships to affordable primary and urgent care coverage for “living wage employees” and raised a seed round from firms and angel investors. Dan joined full-time after the batch, he stopped paying Conor through Venmo and the company formally set up Gusto, and the team was Conor, Dan and himself. He said he is a sole founder with no co-founders. He wrote that from September 2020 the company was hiring engineers, sales representatives and writers. A photo caption in an Invent Penn State article lists the team of the time: founding engineer Dan Patterson, founder Joseph Kitonga, engineer Stella Li and Conor Lang in sales.⁠[14][4][20][23]

TechCrunch’s article of July 27, 2020 states that Vitable Health was the 23-year-old entrepreneur’s first company, that it used nurse practitioners rather than doctors, that its lowest plan started at $15 a month with a $30 co-payment, and that its technicians could also perform lab tests at home; at the time it operated only in Philadelphia and already had 1,000 people receiving care through it. He is quoted in it as saying, “We focus on acute and preventive coverage,” and “We work with a lot of small businesses that might have 10 or 20 employees.”⁠[5]

On October 21, 2020, TechCrunch wrote that SoftBankSoftBank GroupSoftBank Group (SoftBank Group Corp.) is an investment holding company headquartered in Tokyo, founded by Masayoshi Son in 1981. Starting out as a distributor of personal computer software, it moved into the internet, broadband and mobile communications, and has since become an investment group centered on AI-related assets such as Arm, the SoftBank Vision Funds and OpenAI.Open the full entry’s $100 million Opportunity Fund had made its first investment, leading a $1.6 million commitment to Vitable Health in which Y Combinator, DNA Capital, Commerce Ventures, MSA Capital, Coughdrop Capital and angel investors such as Immad AkhundImmad AkhundImmad Akhund is a company founder and angel investor, and the co-founder and CEO of Mercury. He attended Clare College, University of Cambridge, and co-founded RevMap, Clickpass, and Heyzap; Heyzap was acquired in 2016. In 2017, he co-founded Mercury with Jason Zhang and Max Tagher, combining business account services with financial software. His public investments include Zero Hash and Lightfield.Open the full entry also took part; the article calls him a 23-year-old entrepreneur and quotes Paul Judge of the fund: “We’ve been inspired by Joseph and his approach to addressing this challenge.” The press list on Vitable Health’s website carries a Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry article of the same date, “SoftBank invested some of its first millions from a new $100 million fund in Vitable Health after seeing this pitch deck.”⁠[6][24]

A post on Vitable Health’s website dated February 1, 2021, written in the founder’s first person, announces that the company raised $1.6 million, led by the SoftBank Group Corp Opportunity Fund and including Y Combinator, DNA Capital, Commerce Ventures, MSA Capital, Coughdrop Capital and the angel investors Immad Akhund (chief executive of Mercury) and Allison Pickens (former chief operating officer of Gainsight), and states that the money would also be used to extend coverage to residents of New JerseyNew JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the eastern United States on the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by New York State, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with the Hudson River forming its northeastern boundary and the Delaware River its western boundary; its capital is Trenton and its largest city is Newark. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1787, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 9,288,994.Open the full entry and DelawareDelawareDelaware is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic region on the East Coast, with its capital at Dover and Wilmington as its largest city. On December 7, 1787, it became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, entering the Union as the 1st state, and it had a population of 989,948 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. In it he wrote, “From the very first meeting with SoftBank, I was excited by our shared view of how technology can shape a positive future.” The post opens with the words of Shu Nyatta, managing partner of the SoftBank Group Corp Opportunity Fund: “Vitable is a great idea, with a great founder, solving an important problem in the world.” Invent Penn State also published an article stating that Vitable Health had raised $1.6 million from the SoftBank Group Corp Opportunity Fund.⁠[25][23]

The Philadelphia Inquirer, in December 2021, and Technical.ly, in September 2021, each placed the $1.6 million investment earlier in that year. In Invent Penn State’s Q&A he said the company raised $1.5 million from investors at the end of Y Combinator’s three-month program, that the team had grown to six from himself alone eight months earlier, and that it operated in five counties of the Philadelphia area.⁠[8][19][20]

TechCrunch’s article of February 2026 states that Stacy Brown-PhilpotStacy Brown-PhilpotStacy Brown-Philpot is a business executive and investor who spent nearly a decade at Google, became chief operating officer of the gig services platform TaskRabbit in 2013 and was its CEO from 2016 to 2020, and launched the early-stage venture firm Cherryrock Capital in 2023.Open the full entry first invested in Vitable at the seed stage, through her work with the SoftBank Opportunity Fund.⁠[26]

On December 30, 2020, the Thiel Foundation announced the 2020 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, which included him; under the list heading “Name: Hometown, Current Location,” his entry gives “Philadelphia, PA.” The announcement describes his project as follows: Vitable offers its members primary and urgent care medical coverage, using virtual and in-home visits, with no copays. It states that fellows receive $100,000 and mentorship from the foundation’s network of founders, investors and scientists over the two-year program.⁠[27]

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote in December 2021 that the fellowship from Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry’s foundation provides $100,000 over two years to young entrepreneurs who skip college or drop out, and that he had been awarded it the previous year. In his Y Combinator bio he wrote that he “dropped out of Penn State with the Thiel Fellowship to start Vitable Health.” The show notes of a 2025 podcast episode state that the fellowship gave him the opportunity to focus on his startup.⁠[8][14][17][28]

On February 1, 2021, the podcast Passionate Pioneers with Mike Biselli, hosted by Mike Biselli, released episode 118, “Redesigning the Healthcare Experience with Joseph Kitonga.” The guest bio on the episode page calls him a Kenyan-American immigrant, a 2020 Thiel Fellow and a member of Y Combinator’s S20 batch who studied computer engineering at Penn State, interned at Microsoft on Xbox and then turned down a full-time offer and left school. The topics listed on the page are how his childhood experience with his parents’ business shaped his interest in healthcare, his path to becoming a healthcare innovation entrepreneur, Vitable Health’s model of providing care to its members, and where he saw the industry heading over the following two years.⁠[17]

Technical.ly’s article of September 2, 2021 states that Vitable Health was based in Woodlyn, in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, served about 10,000 clients in the Philadelphia and Delaware markets, and had 15 full-time employees, with plans to triple that number within 12 to 18 months and then to expand to other markets in the Northeast. He is quoted in it as saying, “We have the opportunity to build a generational company,” and that in the pandemic “essential, everyday workers put their lives on the line,” many of them without health insurance.⁠[19]

In October 2021 Vitable Health announced $7.2 million in venture capital. The company’s post on this $7.2 million round states that the money came from First Round CapitalFirst Round CapitalVenture capital firm.Open the full entry, whose Josh Kopelman joined the board, with angel investors including Jack AltmanJack AltmanJack Altman is a general partner at Benchmark and a member of its management company, and the co-founder and executive chairman of Lattice.Open the full entry (chief executive of Lattice), Michael Seibel (managing director at Y Combinator), Daniel Folkman (vice president of business development at GoPuff) and Toyin Ajayi (co-founder of Cityblock Health). The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that Philadelphia’s First Round Capital contributed more than 80% of the round. The same post states that Vitable charged $50 per employee per month, worked with hundreds of employers and had almost 10,000 members in Philadelphia and Delaware, with customers including Somerset Academy, HumanWorks Affiliates and Tria Restaurant Group, that Juli Insinger, a co-founder of Carrot Fertility, was joining as chief revenue officer, and that it would add a mental health offering with counseling from licensed clinical social workers. The press list on Vitable Health’s website carries a Forbes article dated October 28, 2021, “This Startup Just Raised $7.2 Million To Provide Healthcare For Hourly Workers.”⁠[18][8][24]

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s article of December 26, 2021 calls him a 24-year-old software engineer from Delaware County. It states that Vitable had signed up about 10,000 people in southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware and sold virtual and in-person primary and urgent care to small employers of hourly workers for about $50 a month per employee; that it was headquartered in Woodlyn with a second office in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties; that it employed 22 people and used about 50 nurse practitioners as independent contractors; that its software, including the member app, the electronic medical records and the employer dashboard, was built by him and his employees; and that the next market would be Baltimore, in the following February. The company did not disclose annual revenue or profitability.⁠[8]

The customers named in the same article are Somerset Academy, a child-care center and preschool in Philadelphia with 22 employees, whose director Tiffany Chavous said, “We absolutely love Vitable”; Elite Care & Staffing LLC of Upper Darby, whose president is Olive Baimba, which learned of Vitable in September 2020 and signed a three-year contract covering 150 full-time workers out of more than 300 employees; and Tria, which has three restaurants in Center City and buys the service for its 65 employees. He is quoted as saying, “Vitable is built to be their primary-care plan that is both affordable and accessible,” and that he wanted to build the service for his parents and their employees. First Round Capital partner Josh Kopelman said, “Joseph connects to this on so many levels”; the article notes that Josh Kopelman chairs The Philadelphia Inquirer’s board.⁠[8]

On December 1, 2021, Forbes released its 2022 healthcare “30 Under 30” list; the list as printed that day by Becker’s Hospital Review includes the entry “Joseph Kitonga, 24, founder, Vitable Health” and names Toyin Ajayi, Aneesh Chopra, Matt McCambridge and Deena Shakir as the list’s judges. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that Forbes had named him to its list of 30 entrepreneurs under 30 to watch in 2022.⁠[7][8]

In March 2022 the Kenyan outlets Kenyans.co.ke and Citizen Digital each published articles about his place on the list. Kenyans.co.ke’s article states that Forbes described him as a Kenyan software developer who left Pennsylvania State University to start the business; Citizen Digital’s article states that Vitable had by then raised $9 million (about Ksh1.02 billion) from investors.⁠[9][10]

On August 2, 2023, Mercury’s blog published “Memory Bank: Joseph Kitonga of Vitable Health,” written in his first person and set down by Mercury’s Angela Brock. In it he called hourly workers’ lack of affordable care “the problem I would go on to devote my life to solving,” said that the virtual care which spread during the pandemic and recent advances in artificial intelligence made it possible to lower the cost of care, and said the company’s offering is meant for the 30 million Americans without insurance; he also said that when he walks through neighborhoods like the one in Philadelphia he grew up in, he thinks of how life expectancy is upwards of 20 years longer a zip code away. He said he loves “building for the sake of building.”⁠[2]

On July 19, 2024, Vitable Health announced in Philadelphia a $16 million Series A led by Cherryrock Capital, with Newark Venture Partners, the Citi Impact Fund, First Round Capital, Commerce Ventures and Y Combinator participating; the release states that the company was founded in 2020 and had raised more than $25 million in venture capital. It states that Vitable then covered more than 50,000 lives across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, IllinoisIllinoisIllinois is a state of the United States that borders Lake Michigan and the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa; its capital is Springfield and its largest city is Chicago. It was admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818, as the 21st state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 12,812,508.Open the full entry, Delaware, MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, Washington, D.C. and FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, that it “costs employers just $1 a day,” that it had launched in Florida that month with TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry and OhioOhioOhio is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital is Columbus. It joined the Union in 1803 as the 17th state, the first carved from the Northwest Territory, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 11,799,448.Open the full entry next, and that it aimed to be available in more than 40 states. MedCity News’s article of July 22, 2024 states that employers pay an average of $30 per employee per month.⁠[16][15]

In MedCity News he is quoted as saying, “We stayed in Pennsylvania for a really long time,” and “The next phase for us is to take what’s worked in Pennsylvania and replicate it across the U.S.” He said upwards of 70% of emergency room visits are unnecessary and cost an average of a few thousand dollars each, and added, “What’s left underserved are the small businesses that really employ the majority of working Americans.”⁠[15]

In a post under his own name dated July 19, 2024 he wrote that the company aims to “increase the average life expectancy of our members by over 5 years” and that Vitable grew out of his having seen, growing up, hourly workers forced to choose between basic necessities and healthcare; the post also states that since the fundraise the company had launched in Florida, Texas and Ohio.⁠[29][30]

On July 29, 2024, Citigroup’s website published a Q&A with him by Ryan Alam, whose byline gives his title as “Senior Vice President, Investing.” He said Vitable worked with more than 400 companies and covered over 50,000 lives; asked what he had learned, he said that there is no shortcut to empathy for the people you serve, which takes real work, and that whenever they had tried to be visionaries about how the world “should” work, it almost never worked.⁠[3]

On May 7, 2025, Vitable Health announced that it had acquired Liferaft’s HRA platform. Liferaft, founded by Nimish Shukla and Ian Blumenfeld, designed benefit plans based on health reimbursement arrangements for small and midsize employers, and the announcement states that it had raised $11 million from investors including XYZ Venture Capital, Costanoa Ventures and Oceans. In the announcement he said, “For decades, employers have faced an impossible choice,” and that combining Liferaft’s ICHRA technology with Vitable’s direct care network breaks that trade-off. The announcement states that Vitable Health had raised $25 million.⁠[31][30][24][11]

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s article of May 21, 2025 states that Vitable was expanding its virtual primary care service for hourly workers nationally and had begun offering its own basic health plans to employers in low-wage industries. It states that the company started in the Philadelphia area with child care, senior care, restaurants and small-scale manufacturing and had expanded to Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois and Washington, D.C.; more than 400 employers used it, paying $30 to $50 a month, and those employers had more than 100,000 employees. The company employed 60 people, had offices in Woodlyn in Delaware County, in Philadelphia’s Center City and in San Francisco, worked with clinicians on contract and had received $25 million in venture capital; he declined to disclose revenue. He said, “We’ve gone slow to get the model right. Now we want to bring the service to all small businesses across the country.”⁠[11]

The same article states that the Philadelphia version of the service included pop-up physician visits at workplaces and home visits, which he said would be available only in certain markets as the company expanded, and that Vitable added basic health plans after employers said its primary care plan offered more than the minimum coverage they were buying to meet Affordable Care Act requirements; “It did really well. It grew quickly,” he said. Of individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements (ICHRA) he said, “employers can set a budget, employees can go and select a plan, then the plan is portable with the employee.”⁠[11]

The post list on Vitable Health’s website shows that the first episode of the company’s podcast series, “The Five Mile Difference,” was published on June 9, 2025, with Tom Sondergeld, a former WalgreensWalgreensWalgreens is an American retail pharmacy chain founded in 1901 that offers prescription filling, vaccinations, health services and everyday retail goods. Its operating company, Walgreen Co., was formerly part of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) and became an independently operated private company after Sycamore Partners completed its acquisition in 2025.Open the full entry vice president, as guest, and that the eighth episode, with Sean Duffy of Omada Health, had been published by November 4, 2026.⁠[30]

On September 22, 2025 he was the guest on episode 32 of the podcast Digital Health Heavyweights, hosted by Norm Volsky, an episode of 37 minutes 16 seconds. The show notes state that Vitable had about 100,000 members and combined in-home and virtual care, that he regards the Y Combinator experience as pivotal for the company’s growth, and that he stresses talking directly with users and building empathy through direct contact with clients.⁠[28]

TechCrunch’s article of February 14, 2026 about Stacy Brown-Philpot, who launched Cherryrock Capital, names Vitable Health as another of her bets and describes it as a Philadelphia-based company founded by Joseph Kitonga, a Thiel Fellow and Y Combinator alum, that offers on-demand, primary care-based health insurance to employers and hourly workers. Stacy Brown-Philpot is quoted in it as saying that he “is the exact kind of founder that we want to back” and that “He does what he says he’s going to do.”⁠[26]

As of November 2026, the “About Us” page of Vitable Health’s website lists him as founder and chief executive and states that he left college and his job at Microsoft to build a company that began by supporting home health workers and grew into a virtual-first benefits platform. Y Combinator’s company page shows Vitable Health as active, located in Philadelphia, with a team of 60, offering startups and small and midsize businesses an ICHRA (individual coverage health reimbursement arrangement) with built-in direct primary care, and names First Round Capital, Cherryrock, Y Combinator and SoftBank among its backers and Michael Seibel, Immad Akhund, Allison Pickens, Jack Altman and Dan Folkman among the “founders and operators” backing it.⁠[1][14]

In the acknowledgments of his Substack post he wrote, “Special thanks to my family: Mom, dad, Job, Mercy, Grace, Dante, Lesly & Lesley”; the friends he thanked are Adam, (Xiang) Codez, Dan, Farabi, Conor and J.O.⁠[4]

Kenyans.co.ke wrote in March 2022 that outside technology he enjoys music, playing the guitar and chess. The show notes of a 2025 podcast episode state that he practices mindfulness and reads to manage stress and stay focused.⁠[9][28]

His Substack publication is named “Five Mile Difference,” with the description “I’m building Vitable Health (YC S20). Sometimes I’ll write some stuff”; the bio on his Substack profile reads, “I largely can’t control my life’s outcome, but I can certainly control the inputs.” His advice to entrepreneurs is to “build for the sake of building, don’t build for outcome,” and to “Fall in love with the process.”⁠[13][32][20]

Vitable Health: Official website: https://www.vitablehealth.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Y Combinator: Official website: https://www.ycombinator.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

Substack: Personal publication: https://josephkitonga.substack.com (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephkitonga/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]