Building Bridges

When Laurie Jimenez (BA ’26, MPH ’27) and Adam Crittenden (MBA ’25) pitched FulcrumCare at SOM’s first-ever startup-engineering matchmaking event in spring 2025, they were looking for more than just technical skills – they needed someone who believed in their mission to improve dental care access for underserved communities.

They found that person in Johannes Bertram, a visiting engineering student from Germany.

"Johannes approached us right after the pitch," Adam recalls. "I think he just really connected with what we were saying and what we were trying to deliver.”

The matchmaking event was the brainchild of Rudy Cordero (MMS-TM ’25), who coordinated between the SOM Program on Entrepreneurship and students in CPSC 776, “Topics in Industrial AI Applications.” The concept was simple but effective: let founders present their technical challenges to engineering students who could choose which venture to support.

For FulcrumCare, which aims to close the care gap for Medicaid and Medicare dental patients through partnerships with primary care organizations, the timing was perfect. The team needed to build a patient engagement chatbot that could help patients schedule appointments and communicate with care providers.

"We realized that to be able to deliver a care model, we needed to build out our own technology," Adam explains. "Because there's not another organization trying to do what we're trying to do."

Johannes, who was spending six months at Yale from Germany, was immediately drawn to FulcrumCare's presentation. "Their pitch was very well organized, and they had clear ideas about what they wanted to do as a startup, how they wanted to achieve it, and how I could help them," he noted.

The collaboration focused on building Francesca – a chatbot that would enable patients to schedule, reschedule, and cancel appointments directly in FulcrumCare's database.

The three-month collaboration proved invaluable for both sides. "[They were] excellent in providing clear guidance on what FulcrumCare needed, as well as listening to and respecting my ideas,” Johannes said.

The partnership extended beyond the classroom. Johannes attended Startup Yale in April, where he watched FulcrumCare win the Thorne Prize and Audience Choice Award. "Laurie and Adam were so happy to win this award; this really showed me how deeply they cared about their project and mission," he said. The team celebrated with dinner at September in Bangkok after the win.

For Adam and Laurie, having a working technical product was transformative. "The work that we did was just so tangible," Adam reflects. "We could show that we were actually moving towards a technical product in a way that I think really established our competence as entrepreneurs and as people who are trying to innovate in this space."

The collaboration continued even after the course ended. Johannes worked with the team through the summer, helping with server setup for deploying Francesca, until his master's thesis demanded his full attention. Even now, the team stays in touch. "We email him periodically when we're meeting with health information exchanges or other software engineers," Laurie says. "He’s our go-to for these kinds of questions."

In an age when AI tools make it easier than ever to build basic prototypes, Adam sees clear value in partnerships like the one with Johannes. "You can vibe code better if you actually know what you're doing," he notes. "Being able to have the time for me to do what I need to do while also trusting that Johannes is going to do a great job – there's a comfort in that."

The partnership also freed up bandwidth for the team to pursue other crucial elements. While Johannes focused on Francesca, Adam could concentrate on building out Hill House, FulcrumCare's population health management tool, which draws more on his data engineering background.

For Johannes, the experience offered invaluable hands-on learning. "I learned a lot about startup culture and teamwork in general, as well as doing my own hands-on learning [while] developing Francesca: specifically, improving my engineering skills for GenAI, agentic systems, and server setup," he shared.

Today, FulcrumCare is actively developing its population health management tool – what they believe will be the first such tool designed specifically for predominantly Medicare and Medicaid patients in a dental setting. The team is in discussions with potential clinical partners and working toward their primary milestone: establishing a pilot partnership with a primary care organization.

Both Adam and Johannes have since graduated, but the collaboration continues. "I really hope to stay in touch and, given enough free time, continue working with FulcrumCare to support their amazing idea and mission," Johannes said.

For Laurie, the partnership demonstrates a key advantage of Yale's entrepreneurial ecosystem. "You are able to tap into the skill sets that are available at Yale," she explains. "It's really good, especially early on, when you may not have as much to show. Working with and learning from Johannes has given us a lot of momentum.”

The matchmaking event proved so successful that the Program on Entrepreneurship plans to offer it again this spring, giving more founders and engineers the chance to collaborate and build together.