Aaron Patzer

Co-Founder & CEO Vital

Last Reviewed: September 25, 2026

Executive Summary

Aaron Patzer is the co-founder and chief executive of Vital, a company that makes patient-facing software for hospitals. It predicts emergency-room wait times, explains test results and doctors’ notes in plain language, and simplifies discharge instructions, all delivered to a patient’s phone without an app or login. He is best known as the founder of Mint.com, the free personal-finance service that won the first TechCrunch40 in 2007 and was bought by Intuit in 2009 for about $170 million. He started Vital in 2017 with his brother-in-law, emergency physician Dr. Justin Schrager. It has raised more than $40 million and reports that it is used in more than 100 hospitals, including facilities at CommonSpirit, MedStar Health and Emory Healthcare.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and CEO of Vital, listed as Chief Executive Officer on the company’s leadership page and quoted as co-founder and CEO in its 2025 and 2026 releases.
• Raised a $5.2 million seed round for Vital in 2019 and a $24.7 million Series B in 2023 led by Transformation Capital, in which he also invested personally.
• Founded Mint Software Inc. in 2006 and served as president and CEO. Mint won the first TechCrunch40 in 2007, and Intuit completed its acquisition on 2 November 2009 for total consideration of about $171 million.
• Stayed at Intuit after the sale as general manager of its Personal Finance Group and then vice president of product innovation.
• Co-founded and ran Fountain, an on-demand expert-advice app acquired by Porch.com in 2015.
• Recognised among Slice of Healthcare’s Top 35 Digital Health Leaders in 2024.

Professional Journey

Patzer trained as an engineer. He holds bachelor’s degrees in computer science, electrical engineering and computer engineering from Duke University and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton. Early in his career he worked for IBM, where, according to InvestmentNews, he helped build the Cell microprocessor used in Sony’s PlayStation 3. He also started two small web development and online marketing businesses. He later worked as an architect and technical lead for the San Jose division of Nascentric.

In 2006 he founded Mint Software. TechCrunch later wrote that he designed Mint to meet his own needs: a free, automatic way to manage money online. Its transaction categorisation drew on the machine-learning work behind the roughly a dozen algorithm patents he holds. Mint won the first TechCrunch40 competition in 2007. By August 2009 its SEC Form D listed Patzer as president and CEO and as a director. Intuit bought the company, completing the acquisition on 2 November 2009 for total consideration of about $171 million, and placed Mint in the segment that also held Quicken. Patzer stayed on, first as general manager of the Personal Finance Group and then as vice president of product innovation across Intuit.

He left to start Fountain with co-founder and CTO Jean Sini. Fountain was an app that connected people with experts by text, voice or video, and it came to focus on home-repair questions. The idea grew out of maintaining the home he bought in New Zealand after the Mint sale. Porch.com acquired Fountain in October 2015. Patzer did not join Porch, staying on as a product adviser while he moved overseas.

In January 2017 he started Vital with Dr. Justin Schrager, an emergency medicine physician who is also his brother-in-law. They targeted the emergency department, where Patzer argued that hospitals were running “outdated, slow, and inefficient software”. He invested his own money and two years of research before the public launch in April 2019, alongside a $5.2 million seed round from First Round Capital, DFJ, Refactor Capital, SV Angel and the founders of Flatiron Health. Vital layers a consumer-grade, mobile interface over hospital records systems such as Epic, Cerner and Meditech. It has since expanded from the emergency department into inpatient, urgent care and surgical settings, and into a consumer doctor-finder. A $24.7 million Series B led by Transformation Capital followed in 2023. In 2025 the company said its software had reached more than 5 million patients, and in September 2026 TIME and Statista listed it among the world’s top health-tech companies.

Education

Duke University

Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering

Princeton University

Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering