Company leader
Veeraj Shah
Co-founder and CEO
Vitalize
Veeraj Shah is co-founder and chief executive of Vitalize, AI software that helps health systems schedule staff and plan capacity. He studied neurobiology and health policy at the University of Maryland, started the company as a student, and left a Gates Cambridge Scholarship PhD program at the University of Cambridge to run it.
Public Health at the University of Maryland
Shah graduated from the University of Maryland in 2021 with degrees in health policy and technology and in neurobiology, according to a 2021 profile on the university's Dingman Center blog. As a sophomore he interned with the chief administrator of health and human services for Prince George's County, and the next summer he was a business analyst intern at IBM Watson Health, working on technology for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He also founded STEPS, an education nonprofit, and co-founded Chat Health, a chatbot meant to improve access to care, according to the School of Public Health.
Starting Vitalize as a Burnout App
Shah and fellow Maryland student Sanketh Andhavarapu co-founded Vitalize in 2021 as a mobile app offering cognitive behavioral therapy to clinicians, with analytics on staff well-being for hospital leaders. “Both of us have had mentors and family members suffer from burnout as healthcare providers,” the founders told the Dingman Center. Shah won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship for a public health PhD at the University of Cambridge but left the program early to lead the company, and the School of Public Health later gave him its Outstanding Young Alumnus Award.
Moving Into Staffing and Capacity
Vitalize went through Y Combinator and now sells software that schedules staff and forecasts patient demand across health systems. “Health systems are still running their single largest cost center on spreadsheets and group texts,” Shah said when Vitalize announced a $31 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT in October 2026.