In August 2023, Kuldeep Singh Rajput quietly stopped being chief executive of the company he had co-founded eight years earlier. A spokesperson confirmed it to STAT. There was no farewell announcement. The news came about a month after Biofourmis laid off 120 people worldwide, 48 of them in the United States.
That was a hard fall for a company that had become a unicorn only the previous year. Biofourmis had been founded in 2015 in Singapore, and search coverage says Rajput started it after leaving a PhD programme there, with Wendou Niu as co-founder. Little else about his childhood or education appears in public reports.
A committee of executives ran the company while the board searched for a new chief.
The idea was to watch patients at home. Wearable sensors and software would track signs of trouble and flag them before a hospital stay became necessary. It was a pitch health systems and drug companies wanted to hear, and money followed. A US$300 million Series D in 2022, backed by SoftBank, General Atlantic and CVS Health, valued the company at US$1.3 billion. A further round of about US$20 million came some months later. Total funding was reported between US$445 million and US$464 million.
Then the math caught up. Layoffs in July 2023 were described by the company as finding the right structure for what came next. A month later the founder left. A committee of executives ran the company while the board searched for a new chief. Ben Wanamaker of General Atlantic took a board seat, joined by Omar Ishrak, former Medtronic chief, and Sachin Jain of SCAN Health Plan.
In October 2024, Biofourmis merged with CopilotIQ. One account said the deal joined CopilotIQ's consumer-facing business with Biofourmis's enterprise health-care customers; another called it an all-stock deal. The combined company was reported to be led by CopilotIQ's chief executive, David Koretz. Rajput reportedly transferred his shares to existing investors and started another health-tech company.
What a founder can take from this is uncomfortable but useful. A big valuation is a promise to grow into it, and when growth slows the first person asked to carry that promise is often the one who made it.