Key Learnings From Sumit’s Experience
- Steal like an artist. Draw inspiration from the successes and failures of other adjacent industries. Try to see the recurring patterns and simplify them to see if they translate to your domain, too. To nurture this framework, foster a collaborative environment where ideas are openly shared and feedback is actively sought.
- Each phase of your business, from invention to scaling, requires different resources and priorities. Be clear about what the moment needs and adapt your strategy and mindset accordingly. Set clear and stage-appropriate goals, raise the necessary amount of capital—without excess—and meet those milestones. When complete, adapt your mindset and strategy for the next stage.
- Cultivate an inquisitive mindset and make listening an integral part of your company culture. Gather input from diverse sources to see patterns and make an informed roadmap. Choose partners authentically and invest time in those relationships to build trust, understand their goals, and support each other.
Sumit Nagpal has built and scaled five companies over the past 30 years, each progressively tackling more substantial problems at scale. He’s now the founder and CEO of Cherish Health, a startup developing intelligent radar-based sensor platforms to detect rising health and safety risks before they become life threatening or expensive emergencies.
Sumit’s career began when he worked with Steve Jobs while he was at NeXT. Inspired by the experience, he embarked on a mission to solve significant healthcare challenges. At Accenture, he spearheaded their global digital health initiative. During a break between companies, Sumit realized the root of many healthtech problems: unexpected costs. Large companies from other sectors regularly engage with the healthcare market, which represents a significant portion of the GDP. However, they can’t sustain these initiatives because healthcare requires sustained commitment, sometimes over decades, to become a scalable business. Healthcare is hard – as illustrated by the example of Walmart Health's recent closure after the company lost a quarter of a billion dollars.
During a brainstorming session with Accenture, Sumit realized a large chunk of healthcare expenses came from preventable ambulance rides, ER visits, and hospital stays. The question was: How could we detect rising health risks or emergencies at home before they escalate? Existing solutions often rely on wearables or gadgets that people have to remember to use and charge. However, the novelty often wears off, and the devices end up forgotten in drawers. Many people at later stages of life may not even remember they have them, much less choose to wear them or use them reliably.
This is how Cherish started in early 2020. The company began developing in-home safety solutions – a radar-based sensor technology that could be placed discreetly in a room to monitor and detect emergencies. The product took four years to develop, and in 2024, the team introduced their flagship product, Serenity, at CES. Today, Cherish is a partner of leading companies in a variety of verticals including one of the largest home security firms in the US, Alarm.com, and a major telecommunications company, AT&T.
Cherish's technology has wide-ranging applications, from monitoring pediatric asthma to supporting individuals with dementia—and the company is just beginning to explore its possibilities. Currently, Serenity is in production, with plans to ship by the end of 2024.
Over the past three decades, serial entrepreneur Sumit Nagpal has co-founded and grown five companies that have tackled some of the boldest challenges faced by the healthcare economy. Today, Sumit is the founder and CEO of Cherish Health, a company developing radar-based health and safety monitoring devices, and serves on the board of HIMSS where he also chairs the Nominating Committee.
How to Steal Like an Artist
The concept of stealing like an artist is not about stealing but about being open to new possibilities. “When you look elsewhere, in out-of-the-box places, breakthroughs happen,” says Sumit. He likes to identify the root cause of complex problems by looking at the problems that other companies, both within and outside his field, fail to overcome.
Sumit learned how to distill very complex ideas down to their essence from none other than Steve Jobs. It also helps that he’s a great observer and a strong proponent of learning from others' lessons.
Sumit knew that a solution to lowering expenses in healthcare, while massively reducing hardship, would be a solid business. The main culprit of cost in healthcare is when people wind up in ambulances, emergency rooms, and hospitalizations– and a significant portion of these incidents are either avoidable or can be more treatable with quick intervention. So that’s why he started looking for a way to predict and point to emergencies at home.
The development of Serenity took four years. During this time, Sumit again drew inspiration from other industries. For example, he knew that wearables are often discarded due to user fatigue, ending up in drawers. Then he looked at adjacent industries, like home security, which uses passive ambient sensing to detect unwelcome intruders. He took this idea and turned it into protecting people, rather than just their property.
Having an open mindset goes a long way, and it’s an attitude that applies to company culture as much as it does to your business strategy. For example, at Cherish, they crowdsource ideas: "We constantly reach out to our investors, advisors, board members, and our extended network asking questions, looking for ideas, and opinions," Sumit shares. By doing so, their team can break out of the echo chamber that often exists within most organizations and teams.
Be Stage Appropriate in Funding and Beyond
Raising money for completely novel technology is especially hard. “Creating something new requires leaps of faith because it doesn’t achieve any scale or economies of scale until it actually works,” says Sumit. Still, Cherish Health has impressively secured over $30 million in funding. But they didn’t do it the traditional way. They started by raising capital on a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) with wealthy individuals and corporate sponsors instead of venture capital—and continually increased their valuation through milestones and strategic investments. The team is now targeting a $30 million Series B round to reach a $200 million valuation.
“The biggest lesson we've learned is the power of doing more with less. That allows you to focus on what matters,” says Sumit. This helps the team stay focused on their competitive advantage rather than spreading their effort on features and services that may be commodities.
Being super disciplined about the capital you raise keeps you focused, but it requires thoughtful iteration and adaptation. “Our plan continued to evolve,” says Sumit, and it’s okay. During the development phase, Cherish Health persistently refined Serenity and its market strategy, discarding what was unnecessary and constantly looking for alternatives.
“Sometimes having too much money means you wind up doing things that you just don't need to at that moment,” says Sumit. With excess funds, you might start unnecessary departments, burn resources, and create a cycle of fundraising that doesn’t lead anywhere. That’s why he advises stage-appropriate fundraising: set your goals, raise just that amount, accomplish the goals, and repeat.
For Sumit, being stage-appropriate applies to most other aspects of the business, even to his mindset as the CEO. At the beginning of his career, Sumit didn’t necessarily enjoy the process of raising capital, but that was something he had to overcome. He shares his thought process around fundraising now: “If this strategy is going to work out, I'm going to have to become the guy who loves this. And that's what I do now. You either become the person the moment calls for, or you bring in the person the moment calls for. It all boils down to what the moment needs and then going and figuring out how to do that.”
Once you've actually achieved a certain target or milestone, you ought to celebrate, but look to rinse and repeat. Sumit explains the stages Cherish has been through: “First, it's been about the invention, actually making it work. Then, it's been about building it. Then it's been about scaling that and taking the cost out.” All these stages require their own way of capitalization and have their own set of skills and priorities.
Sumit puts it this way: “There's got to be stage-appropriate funding, stage-appropriate strategy, stage-appropriate work, stage-appropriate boards, stage-appropriate everything. And it changes as you evolve. Once you've actually achieved a certain target and met a goal, you need to pivot to what's next, and that will require its own way of capitalization and it will have its own set of priorities." This is why for Cherish’s next round of capital, Sumit envisions more traditional funding sources. This is because the company has now de-risked and developed its technology. Investors “can now touch and feel it, they can see our distribution agreements, they can see our readiness for scale and our manufacturing operations. And we've, one step at a time, peeled away at the layers of risk to a point where what's left is more about scaling a business than like inventing nuclear fusion.”
How to Get Lucky: Listen and Be Open-Minded
“Listening is a constant activity,” says Sumit. “It becomes the culture and the lifeblood of the company.” And that’s what he’s building at Cherish. As Sumit puts it, they are “constantly inhaling input.” The feedback eventually makes its way into formal roadmaps, but ultimately, you want to have a lot of signal to see the patterns.
“Alarm.com has been one of the most incredible partners anyone could be lucky enough to have,” Sumit says. This collaboration with the leading smart home security provider has been instrumental in Cherish’s growth, bringing clarity, rationality, and data-driven insights. Cherish partnered with several other global corporations along the way, all well-aligned with its mission.
Effective partnerships are rooted in the reality of an opportunity, a shared technology, and a common vision. Currently building his fifth company and having made deals with many partners along the way, Sumit emphasizes the importance of authenticity in choosing partners. Investing time, building trust, and, most importantly, listening is absolutely crucial. You need to understand each partner’s journey, recognize where you can contribute to their success and yours, and be able to work together to achieve it.
After aligning around your goals and how to achieve them, maintain an open mind about your target market. For example, Serenity is currently a consumer-facing product—the insights the team gained from direct user interactions have been invaluable for perfecting Serenity. But for Sumit, just because you can succeed in the consumer market doesn't mean you shouldn't also consider the enterprise opportunity—even though it’s a very demanding market to sell in. Sumit says, “One of our investors is the largest health system in New York state. I have the largest private payer in the U.S. on my board, we've done an 18-month pilot with them that has gone tremendous and has proven some incredible value.”
One might say cultivating luck is a form of art in entrepreneurship. Some keys to Cherish’s succcess proved to be proactive listening, well-calculated partnerships, and maintaining an open mindset toward different opportunities. These three allowed Sumit to transform luck from a fleeting happenstance into a renewable resource that made it possible for the company to cultivate new avenues for growth.
Key Learnings From Sumit’s Experience
- Steal like an artist. Draw inspiration from the successes and failures of other adjacent industries. Try to see the recurring patterns and simplify them to see if they translate to your domain, too. To nurture this framework, foster a collaborative environment where ideas are openly shared and feedback is actively sought.
- Each phase of your business, from invention to scaling, requires different resources and priorities. Be clear about what the moment needs and adapt your strategy and mindset accordingly. Set clear and stage-appropriate goals, raise the necessary amount of capital—without excess—and meet those milestones. When complete, adapt your mindset and strategy for the next stage.
- Cultivate an inquisitive mindset and make listening an integral part of your company culture. Gather input from diverse sources to see patterns and make an informed roadmap. Choose partners authentically and invest time in those relationships to build trust, understand their goals, and support each other.
Sumit Nagpal has built and scaled five companies over the past 30 years, each progressively tackling more substantial problems at scale. He’s now the founder and CEO of Cherish Health, a startup developing intelligent radar-based sensor platforms to detect rising health and safety risks before they become life threatening or expensive emergencies.
Sumit’s career began when he worked with Steve Jobs while he was at NeXT. Inspired by the experience, he embarked on a mission to solve significant healthcare challenges. At Accenture, he spearheaded their global digital health initiative. During a break between companies, Sumit realized the root of many healthtech problems: unexpected costs. Large companies from other sectors regularly engage with the healthcare market, which represents a significant portion of the GDP. However, they can’t sustain these initiatives because healthcare requires sustained commitment, sometimes over decades, to become a scalable business. Healthcare is hard – as illustrated by the example of Walmart Health's recent closure after the company lost a quarter of a billion dollars.
During a brainstorming session with Accenture, Sumit realized a large chunk of healthcare expenses came from preventable ambulance rides, ER visits, and hospital stays. The question was: How could we detect rising health risks or emergencies at home before they escalate? Existing solutions often rely on wearables or gadgets that people have to remember to use and charge. However, the novelty often wears off, and the devices end up forgotten in drawers. Many people at later stages of life may not even remember they have them, much less choose to wear them or use them reliably.
This is how Cherish started in early 2020. The company began developing in-home safety solutions – a radar-based sensor technology that could be placed discreetly in a room to monitor and detect emergencies. The product took four years to develop, and in 2024, the team introduced their flagship product, Serenity, at CES. Today, Cherish is a partner of leading companies in a variety of verticals including one of the largest home security firms in the US, Alarm.com, and a major telecommunications company, AT&T.
Cherish's technology has wide-ranging applications, from monitoring pediatric asthma to supporting individuals with dementia—and the company is just beginning to explore its possibilities. Currently, Serenity is in production, with plans to ship by the end of 2024.
Over the past three decades, serial entrepreneur Sumit Nagpal has co-founded and grown five companies that have tackled some of the boldest challenges faced by the healthcare economy. Today, Sumit is the founder and CEO of Cherish Health, a company developing radar-based health and safety monitoring devices, and serves on the board of HIMSS where he also chairs the Nominating Committee.
How to Steal Like an Artist
The concept of stealing like an artist is not about stealing but about being open to new possibilities. “When you look elsewhere, in out-of-the-box places, breakthroughs happen,” says Sumit. He likes to identify the root cause of complex problems by looking at the problems that other companies, both within and outside his field, fail to overcome.
Sumit learned how to distill very complex ideas down to their essence from none other than Steve Jobs. It also helps that he’s a great observer and a strong proponent of learning from others' lessons.
Sumit knew that a solution to lowering expenses in healthcare, while massively reducing hardship, would be a solid business. The main culprit of cost in healthcare is when people wind up in ambulances, emergency rooms, and hospitalizations– and a significant portion of these incidents are either avoidable or can be more treatable with quick intervention. So that’s why he started looking for a way to predict and point to emergencies at home.
The development of Serenity took four years. During this time, Sumit again drew inspiration from other industries. For example, he knew that wearables are often discarded due to user fatigue, ending up in drawers. Then he looked at adjacent industries, like home security, which uses passive ambient sensing to detect unwelcome intruders. He took this idea and turned it into protecting people, rather than just their property.
Having an open mindset goes a long way, and it’s an attitude that applies to company culture as much as it does to your business strategy. For example, at Cherish, they crowdsource ideas: "We constantly reach out to our investors, advisors, board members, and our extended network asking questions, looking for ideas, and opinions," Sumit shares. By doing so, their team can break out of the echo chamber that often exists within most organizations and teams.
Be Stage Appropriate in Funding and Beyond
Raising money for completely novel technology is especially hard. “Creating something new requires leaps of faith because it doesn’t achieve any scale or economies of scale until it actually works,” says Sumit. Still, Cherish Health has impressively secured over $30 million in funding. But they didn’t do it the traditional way. They started by raising capital on a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) with wealthy individuals and corporate sponsors instead of venture capital—and continually increased their valuation through milestones and strategic investments. The team is now targeting a $30 million Series B round to reach a $200 million valuation.
“The biggest lesson we've learned is the power of doing more with less. That allows you to focus on what matters,” says Sumit. This helps the team stay focused on their competitive advantage rather than spreading their effort on features and services that may be commodities.
Being super disciplined about the capital you raise keeps you focused, but it requires thoughtful iteration and adaptation. “Our plan continued to evolve,” says Sumit, and it’s okay. During the development phase, Cherish Health persistently refined Serenity and its market strategy, discarding what was unnecessary and constantly looking for alternatives.
“Sometimes having too much money means you wind up doing things that you just don't need to at that moment,” says Sumit. With excess funds, you might start unnecessary departments, burn resources, and create a cycle of fundraising that doesn’t lead anywhere. That’s why he advises stage-appropriate fundraising: set your goals, raise just that amount, accomplish the goals, and repeat.
For Sumit, being stage-appropriate applies to most other aspects of the business, even to his mindset as the CEO. At the beginning of his career, Sumit didn’t necessarily enjoy the process of raising capital, but that was something he had to overcome. He shares his thought process around fundraising now: “If this strategy is going to work out, I'm going to have to become the guy who loves this. And that's what I do now. You either become the person the moment calls for, or you bring in the person the moment calls for. It all boils down to what the moment needs and then going and figuring out how to do that.”
Once you've actually achieved a certain target or milestone, you ought to celebrate, but look to rinse and repeat. Sumit explains the stages Cherish has been through: “First, it's been about the invention, actually making it work. Then, it's been about building it. Then it's been about scaling that and taking the cost out.” All these stages require their own way of capitalization and have their own set of skills and priorities.
Sumit puts it this way: “There's got to be stage-appropriate funding, stage-appropriate strategy, stage-appropriate work, stage-appropriate boards, stage-appropriate everything. And it changes as you evolve. Once you've actually achieved a certain target and met a goal, you need to pivot to what's next, and that will require its own way of capitalization and it will have its own set of priorities." This is why for Cherish’s next round of capital, Sumit envisions more traditional funding sources. This is because the company has now de-risked and developed its technology. Investors “can now touch and feel it, they can see our distribution agreements, they can see our readiness for scale and our manufacturing operations. And we've, one step at a time, peeled away at the layers of risk to a point where what's left is more about scaling a business than like inventing nuclear fusion.”
How to Get Lucky: Listen and Be Open-Minded
“Listening is a constant activity,” says Sumit. “It becomes the culture and the lifeblood of the company.” And that’s what he’s building at Cherish. As Sumit puts it, they are “constantly inhaling input.” The feedback eventually makes its way into formal roadmaps, but ultimately, you want to have a lot of signal to see the patterns.
“Alarm.com has been one of the most incredible partners anyone could be lucky enough to have,” Sumit says. This collaboration with the leading smart home security provider has been instrumental in Cherish’s growth, bringing clarity, rationality, and data-driven insights. Cherish partnered with several other global corporations along the way, all well-aligned with its mission.
Effective partnerships are rooted in the reality of an opportunity, a shared technology, and a common vision. Currently building his fifth company and having made deals with many partners along the way, Sumit emphasizes the importance of authenticity in choosing partners. Investing time, building trust, and, most importantly, listening is absolutely crucial. You need to understand each partner’s journey, recognize where you can contribute to their success and yours, and be able to work together to achieve it.
After aligning around your goals and how to achieve them, maintain an open mind about your target market. For example, Serenity is currently a consumer-facing product—the insights the team gained from direct user interactions have been invaluable for perfecting Serenity. But for Sumit, just because you can succeed in the consumer market doesn't mean you shouldn't also consider the enterprise opportunity—even though it’s a very demanding market to sell in. Sumit says, “One of our investors is the largest health system in New York state. I have the largest private payer in the U.S. on my board, we've done an 18-month pilot with them that has gone tremendous and has proven some incredible value.”
One might say cultivating luck is a form of art in entrepreneurship. Some keys to Cherish’s succcess proved to be proactive listening, well-calculated partnerships, and maintaining an open mindset toward different opportunities. These three allowed Sumit to transform luck from a fleeting happenstance into a renewable resource that made it possible for the company to cultivate new avenues for growth.
