Company leader
Bo Gu, MD
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Youlify
Bo Gu is the co-founder and chief executive of Youlify, an AI revenue cycle company built for independent practices. He trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon and emergency physician before turning to billing automation.
Surgery, Emergency Medicine, and a Broken Billing System
Gu began as a cardiothoracic surgeon and later worked as an emergency physician. During the pandemic, while leading his department, he saw revenue fall as billing systems failed, according to his Youlify bio and the company's seed announcement.
"People don't realize how hard it is for doctors to get paid for care they've already delivered," he said in that announcement. "I lived it. As a Physician leader during COVID, I saw our department lose 40% of its revenue because the billing system was broken."
Co-founding Youlify
He co-founded Youlify with Sally Liang, a fintech AI product leader, and Howard Peng, an NLP researcher and former head of AI at NewsBreak. Bonfire Ventures led a $4.3 million seed round in April 2025, and Gu has said the company is profitable on a shared-revenue model, according to Axios Pro.
Youlify automates coding, claims, denial appeals, and payment recovery so practices recover revenue that third-party billers often abandon.