Company leader
Chris Altchek
Founder and CEO
Cadence
Chris Altchek is founder and chief executive of Cadence, a New York company that monitors older adults with chronic disease at home for health systems. Altchek believes the usual two to four doctor visits a year cannot control conditions like heart failure and high blood pressure, and he is trying to fill the time between visits with daily readings and a supervised clinical team.
Growing Up in a Family of Doctors
Altchek grew up in the suburbs of New York in a family of doctors, Forbes reported in 2026. His father is an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery and the longtime medical director of the New York Mets, his grandfather was also an orthopedist, and his sister is an OB-GYN.
Leaving Goldman Sachs to Start Mic
He did not start in medicine. After studying social studies at Harvard, he worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and in 2011 he left to work full time on PolicyMic, a political news and debate site he had started with his friend Jake Horowitz, Business Insider reported that year. "Jake is my political nemesis, and we'd have these major debates, but it was extremely healthy," Altchek said. He put his Goldman bonus into the company.
The site became Mic, and Altchek was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 media list in 2014. Mic reached a $100 million valuation in 2017, then laid off most of its staff and was sold to Bustle in 2018. "It grew fast and then had a spectacular implosion," he told Forbes.
A Conversation About Heart Failure Patients
Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, his wife, Dr. Kasey Grewe, a cardiac anesthesiologist, told him what she was seeing in the intensive care unit at UCLA. "She was taking care of heart failure patients at UCLA, and noticed that none of the patients were on the right drugs," he told Forbes. That led him to start Cadence in August 2021 with Kareem Zaki, a general partner at Thrive Capital. Its first patient was a man in his 80s who had been in and out of the hospital with heart failure for three years and, after his medications were adjusted, played golf again.
Building Cadence
Cadence now works with more than 20 health systems and treats more than 100,000 patients, according to its June 2026 announcement of a $100 million Series C led by Spark Capital. "We built Cadence to solve the clinical labor constraint at the heart of the chronic disease crisis," Altchek said there. He told Forbes his goal is to reach 1 million patients and 100 health systems, "hopefully in three years."