Formidable member Elisabeth Tarullo is CEO and co-founder of Nolia Health. | Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Tarullo
When Elisabeth Tarullo’s father had a stroke at 55, she was far from home, developing valuable business skills with venture-backed startups after having graduated from New York University. Overnight, her stepmother became a fulltime family caregiver, and Tarullo became a remote one. She found herself thrust into a world of specialists, new medications and the quiet, disorienting work of figuring out how to help her family move forward.
“It was in a lot of ways my first interaction with the health care system,” she says. “My career was very impacted by this thing that was really difficult to go through. But I let that kind of lead me to what I did next.”
Tarullo joined a venture-backed startup in the paid caregiving space, immersing herself in how home-based elder care actually works, and how much better outcomes could be when families were given the right support. From there, Amazon recruited her to help launch its health care business, where she spent nearly five years building a national, virtual-first primary care platform, much of it during the pandemic.
Watching more Americans confront the care needs of aging parents with little support to guide them planted the idea in Tarullo’s mind for what would become Nolia Health. She teamed up with a fellow Seattle startup leader who was also navigating caregiving for a parent to co-found the company she wished her own family had had.
Nolia Health launched in 2024. Tarullo defines it as clinical infrastructure that integrates family caregivers into health care delivery.
“We started seeing patients,” Tarullo says. “We took advantage of some new changes on the federal policy level to allow us to do this in a totally insurance covered way, which was a real game changer in terms of financial access.”
'Bigger than any one company’
Today, Nolia is a team of about 20 people with clinicians from across the U.S. It operates in Washington, California and Florida, with plans to launch in Texas, Idaho and Arizona later this year.
For Tarullo, the mission is bigger than any one company.
“The problem I see in our society is that women so often step up and fill gaps that exist because of how our society has been designed. They do it at their own personal cost, and we benefit greatly from that,” she says. “My goal is to change how people actually see health care and relate to health care and experience it.”
She’s also candid about wanting to build in a different way from than the “hustle and grind” startup culture. Sacrificing her health, or her responsibilities as a new mother, isn’t an option.
“I would like to change how family caregiving is seen and valued in our society. I would like to build the household name for trusted clinical family caregiver support. I want every family who's navigating this life transition — which we all will go through — to have a brightly lit path and a connected experience,” Tarullo says. “The instinct to care for one another is the very thing that got our species to where it is today. It's what makes us human. And we should be building around that and not pretending it's weak or it doesn't exist.”
