Lily Vittayarukskul wanted to build airplanes and rockets from an early age. Today, however, she is developing artificial intelligence that helps families prepare for the moment when their loved one can no longer manage everyday life on their own. Her company Waterlily estimates within minutes what care a person will need in old age, how much it will cost, and how much of the work will fall to their partner or children. A family tragedy inspired the idea.
A Family Without a Plan or the Words to Discuss It
From the age of twelve, she competed in NASA programs, started college at fourteen, and at sixteen interned at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. She attended high school during the day and took college courses in the evening. Then her aunt was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. The family began caring for her at home, followed by roughly two and a half years of physically demanding daily care that caused relatives to leave their jobs and schools.
Only then did they discover that health insurance does not cover long-term care. Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors, did not cover her aunt’s treatment, and the family would only have qualified for the Medicaid social welfare program if they had first sold off their assets. They had too much to receive help, yet too little to bear the costs. They paid for everything out of pocket and nearly went bankrupt. We never had a plan, nor did we even have the vocabulary to discuss the issue, Vittayarukskul recalls. Conversations turned into arguments, and members of the extended family have not spoken to one another for more than ten years.
The experience prompted her to change direction. She studied genetics and data science at Berkeley and then led product and engineering teams at several startups focused on artificial intelligence in healthcare. The decisive push came from her mentor, Scott Barclay, who introduced her to experts on aging and eventually asked what was stopping her from founding a company herself. It was partly courage and partly support, she says. She brought on Evan Ehrenberg, who entered Berkeley at eleven, earned a bachelor’s degree at sixteen, and later left his computational neuroscience PhD program at MIT to pursue entrepreneurship. He now runs operations at Waterlily.
Half a Billion Data Points and Three Minutes
Waterlily focuses on the period when a person can no longer manage everyday life without assistance. It is not an illness that can be cured, but an everyday reality that health insurance does not account for and that most people do not consider until they find themselves facing it.
Users complete a form about their health, basic demographic information, and finances, which takes about three minutes. An algorithm trained on more than five hundred million data points then estimates what their aging process is likely to look like, how much care will cost, and how much of it their loved ones would otherwise have to provide. The calculation also factors in rising healthcare prices, average treatment costs, and place of residence.
The system divides the forecast into three stages: initial, intermediate, and full care. Everyone talks about it as if it were only about nursing homes, which is pure misinformation, Vittayarukskul says. In fact, more than ninety percent of users want to age at home. People want to age with dignity and want to have choices, she explains. If users choose home care, the platform predicts how family members would automatically become involved in providing it.
Within seconds, the artificial intelligence then reviews hundreds of thousands of insurance offerings and models what potential benefits would look like for each one. It does not tell people what to do, but shows them where they are likely headed so they can make decisions in time. The risk profile is updated every year to reflect changes in health and life circumstances.
Financial planner Jessica Weaver has worked with the platform for two years. According to her, a subject everyone used to avoid has been transformed into a concrete report she can discuss with clients. Her parents-in-law also had a report prepared, and she says the family now has good coverage.
Professor Balaraman Rajan of California State University, East Bay, appreciates that the service offers tailored solutions. However, he points out that cost estimates remain valid only for a short time. When coverage changes, a new diagnosis emerges, or a person switches insurers, advisors must constantly monitor the estimates.
Loneliness Is a Warning Sign
When Vittayarukskul talks to families about how their need for care began, she keeps hearing the same word: sudden. When the causes were investigated, a similar pattern emerged: several months before their condition worsened, the person began withdrawing, stopped calling, and their personality changed before relatives noticed.
Research commissioned by the company confirmed this. Loneliness is a strong predictor of how serious the need for care will be and how likely it is to develop into dementia. The form therefore asks about loneliness right at the beginning because it significantly affects the forecast.
At the same time, Vittayarukskul does not want people to expect miracles from the system. It is not a crystal ball, but it is much better than assuming you are the national average, she reiterates. The goal is to ensure that conversations about care do not take place only in a hospital hallway, when most options have already disappeared.
Within ten years, she wants to turn Waterlily into a tool that helps entire countries design financially sustainable models for aging. Every developed country faces the same equation: who will pay for care and who will physically provide it when an entire generation can no longer manage life on its own.
This year, the twenty-nine-year-old entrepreneur made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Waterlily opened to the public in 2024 and has since expanded to all fifty U.S. states. The company has raised more than nine million dollars from investors, including Insight Partners and companies such as Genworth, Nationwide, and Edward Jones. The platform is used by four of the five largest U.S. insurers and is expected to reach hundreds of thousands of families by the end of the year.
Source: cbsnews.com
