Portrait No. 001
Nanxi Liu
Co-CEO and Co-Founder
Blaze.tech
Raised — $8M pre-seed
Blaze.tech's AI platform enables healthcare teams to build HIPAA-compliant apps and software 100x faster than traditional development. From patient portals to clinical workflows, Fortune 500s and startups use Blaze to build their most mission-critical software. I was raised in rural China without running water. My parents left when I was a baby and I didn't see them again until I was five, reuniting in Colorado. My mom worked as a waitress and I was on the free lunch program. She told me: \"You're an immigrant and an Asian woman. You will have to work twice as hard.\" So I did. I co-founded a leading digital signage software company, scaled it, sold it. But I kept seeing the same bottleneck: brilliant non-technical people with solutions, but not able to code. After the acquisition, my co-founders and I knew exactly what to build. Blaze was born to put the power of software creation into the hands of people improving healthcare.
In her words
“At Blaze, we're obsessed with turning months of healthcare software development into minutes, while staying HIPAA compliant.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
I started my first company at 21, right out of college. As a woman, an immigrant, a minority in enterprise tech, fundraising took twice the meetings. I was underestimated constantly, but I used it as fuel. With minimal capital, I built that company into a highly profitable global leader in its industry. Then I decided to start over. I took those learnings into founding a startup in healthcare, an industry notorious for red tape and resistance to change. There were lots of no-code and AI app building platforms out there. None prioritized the data security and compliance that healthcare actually demands. We did. We raised an $8 million pre-seed round and built an enterprise-grade platform for complex, secure healthcare apps. Today, hundreds of companies from healthcare startups to large healthcare systems build on Blaze, a product that competes with solutions made by teams ten times our size.
Chapter II
Your vision.
Building apps is hard. Building healthcare apps is way harder. HIPAA, EHR integrations, clinical workflows, data privacy. Regular no-code and AI app builders weren't designed for this. They move fast and break things. In healthcare, breaking things means breaking trust or jeopardizing lives. That's the problem I'm obsessed with. Healthcare organizations are falling behind because available tools either can't meet compliance requirements or take years and millions in custom development. Blaze exists to close that gap. We built a platform where healthcare teams create complex, HIPAA-compliant apps (patient portals, clinical workflows, custom EMRs) fast and without compromising security. The world we're building: one where any individual in a healthcare organization, from a doctor in a rural clinic to the CIO of a major health system, can build technology that improves their work and their patients' lives.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
Healthcare loses people every day to problems technology solved in other industries years ago. The people closest to patients have the ideas, but not the tools. I'm building Blaze so they do. So the doctor who sees the gap builds the fix. So the health system waiting two years for a vendor ships it in a week. So innovation in healthcare stops being slow, expensive, and gatekept. For the next generation of women founders: I hope we leave behind a world where we don't have to be twice as good to get half the chance.