👋 I'm Rareș Gosman.

I was born in Romania, grew up in Canada, and studied mechatronics at Waterloo. Choosing between mechanical, electrical, and software felt wrong, so I picked the program that made me do all three. Co-op brought me to the Bay Area in 2016, and I stayed for most of the next decade.

That mix turned out to be useful. At Tesla, I wrote firmware for the Model 3. At Uber, I built fraud-detection pipelines and risk systems for peer-to-peer money movement. At Athelas, I was an early engineer, when roles were mostly suggestions. I worked across software, firmware, manufacturing, nursing tools, and the first (working) FDA-cleared at-home blood-count device.

Then COVID pushed care out of the clinic. We built tools for physicians to monitor patients at home. That work grew into nursing software, then billing software.

When Athelas acquired a low-tech billing company, my job was to make it high-tech. I embedded with the team in India, mapped how claims actually moved through the operation, then turned those manual handoffs into a production line we could inspect and improve. Every claim had an owner, a state, and a next step. Once the work was visible, we could batch it, measure it, and gradually replace repetitive steps with software.

Athelas also surrounded me with people who made starting a company feel normal. Friends from that early team went on to build SellScale, DOSS, and Assort Health.

My co-founder, Ana, saw a company in something we had both noticed: patients looked forward to their nurse calls. Sometimes a nurse noticing sudden weight gain caught heart failure before the hospital did. The relationship mattered more than the fancy IoT sensors. We started Contour to make that kind of support available on demand to patients on Medicare.

Distribution through hospital partnerships proved harder than building the product. Our closest pilot died when the hospital group got hit by a cyberattack and stopped talking to startups. So we kept testing. We built a collections service for small practices that turned paying a medical bill into one tap with Apple Pay, and explored a few other directions.

Eventually, we built “ChatGPT meets Zillow” for senior care. Families used it and the referral economics made sense, but building the business increasingly meant SEO and lead generation. I wanted harder engineering problems, especially in AI.

Commure acquired Contour in 2026. We had kept the company to two founders and a rotating cast of contractors. If I did it again, I would protect the runway a little less and build the team a little sooner. I thought of hiring as burn. But a small room of sharp people bouncing ideas off one another is worth the burn.

These days, I'm in New York, building developer tools and personal software, and helping bring a hacker space to life in Chinatown. Away from a screen, I'm usually training for something: a marathon, a hike, or maybe just a swim. I'd love to get fast in the water, but finding consistent pool time in this city turns out to be its own endurance event.

Next, I want an ambitious product, excellent people, and a short loop between customer problems and shipped software.