Medicare's 'Most Hated' Man: Chapter's Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz
Chapter has reached $100M in revenue and a $3B valuation by helping seniors get cheaper care. How its ex-Palantir CEO is doing it -- and sparking new controversy.
“I am one of the most hated people in the industry,” Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz says. “I’m bad for business.”
In 2020, Blumenfeld-Gantz’s exposure to his own parents’s struggle navigating Medicare — faxes, phone calls, even a trip to the Social Security office — led him down a rabbit hole of whether someone could build a better way.
“I was just appalled at how absurd the entire ecosystem is,” he says. “And not just the technology, which is a big part of it. There are also just terrible incentives that make every broker push plans that pay them more.”
So he launched Chapter: a startup focused on connecting Americans to better Medicare plans, saving seniors thousands of dollars per year. Recently, Chapter reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue and a $3 billion valuation after receiving backing from Al Gore’s fund Generation Investment Management.
For Blumenfeld-Gantz, that’s proof that his mission is distinctly bipartisan. Founded and led in New York City, Chapter has deep GOP ties, from Blumenfeld-Gantz’s legacy at Palantir to Chapter’s co-founder Vivek Ramaswamy, who was just a billionaire businessman then, but has since run for president and is currently pursuing the GOP nomination for governor in Ohio. One of Chapter’s earliest investors was current Vice President J.D. Vance, when he was just a VC.
Chapter is the only startup we know of backed by vice presidents from both sides of the aisle.
“When people spend time in the government, they see how big of a problem and how complex these systems are,” its CEO says.
On The Upstarts Podcast, Blumenfeld-Gantz shares his journey from foreign policy studies to forward deployed engineer at Palantir; what he learned at the tech company and why it’s proven a startup breeding ground; how Chapter’s nationwide approach helped it reach scale faster; and why he proposes a twist on a typical startup metric: product-market-channel fit.
Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: when last year’s government shutdown cut off Chapter’s data right at the opening of Medicare’s busiest enrollment window, and his team had one week to reverse-engineer their way out.
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This season of The Upstarts Podcast is presented by Mercury: banking, redesigned from the ground up.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:04 Solving his parents’ problem
08:08 From foreign policy to Palantir
12:01 Why Palantir breeds so many startup founders
14:28 Getting started and managing VC no’s
20:24 Why product market channel fit matters
26:51 Cobi’s Upstart Moment: the shutdown
32:33 “One of the most hated people in the industry’
35:41 Tuning out noise and talent density
42:37 Up next: a wider financial platform for senior spend
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