Bay Area woman creates AI tool Waterlily help families’ financial planning

By CBS Bay Area

A Bay Area woman with a long list of accomplishments in her young life, including being recently named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, has created an AI tool to help families do better financial planning.

For 29-year-old Lily Vittayarukskul, the mission is personal. 

“We first look at your current background. Your basic social demographic information, medical information, and financial information,” she said. 

Vittayarukskul is the CEO and co-founder of Waterlily, an AI platform that predicts long-term health plans. 

“Broken up into early care, moderate care and full care. Because everyone talks about this space as if it’s nursing homes all day every day. And that is just blatant misinformation,” she said. “If we start with early care, we show you not nursing homes but the appropriate needs in professional settings, or getting care at the home. Over 90% of our users want to get care done at the home. And if they do, we open up what is the most powerful aspect of our platform, which is predicting how family members would step in by default.” 

The process is pretty simple; you type in your personal information, and within seconds the AI predicts your future care needs. 

Vittayarukskul said she built the algorithm while factoring in healthcare inflation, average medical costs, and the client’s zip code. 

“In a scan of a few seconds, we’ve pulled hundreds of thousands of quotes that offers products in this space, and we model the claim scenarios for each offer they could hypothetically give you,” she said. 

She wants to encourage families to take these hypothetical scenarios and begin financial planning. 

“When I was 16, my aunt was diagnosed with terminal-stage colon cancer. And what came with that was 3 years of navigating her daily long-term care needs,” Vittayarukskul said. “It was financially devastating. We nearly bankrupted ourselves paying anything and everything for her care.” 

And that sparked her passion. At the age of 16, she was enrolled in both high school and college. 

“During the daytime I was in high school, at nighttime I took all of my college classes at the same time,” she said. “I pivoted my technical background from aerospace while I was doing some work with NASA from 12 to 16, to navigating this event, to changing my background into genetics and AI.” 

Vittayarukskul then launched her company about two years ago, and was just recently in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for her innovation in the health insurance industry. 

“Taken something that was a topic that was avoided into a tangible report, deliverable that the clients and we can go through together,” said Jessica Weaver, a Waterlily client and financial planner who has been using the platform for the past two years. 

“My father-in-law and mother-in-law have both taken the report, and now we have what I feel is strong coverage for them if something were to happen. Because they went through it with their own parents. They won’t have to do it to the next generation and so on,” Weaver said. “Myself and my husband, we’re in our late 30s, we have young kids. So, long-term care isn’t at the front of our mind. But if something were to happen to me, I want to leave my family in a better place. So, life insurance is on my mind. Well, we can pair that with these long-term care writers.”
 
Experts like Cal State East Bay professor Balaraman Rajan said there are pros and cons to platforms like these. 

“This website enables customized solutions based on that patient’s coverage and that patient’s current scenario. That’s the greatest pro for this particular company. This company is going to help them better understand their own estimation, their own approximation of their cost,” Raian said. 

“This needs to be continuously monitored,” he added. “Has my coverage changed? Has something new come up? Am I going to switch from one particular company, one insurance company to another? If they are going to come up with a cost estimate for an individual, that cost estimate is only going to be valid for a very short time. So, after that, the advisors have to keep advising this particular estimate.” 

As a licensed insurance agent, Vittayarukskul said she wants others to utilize her platform to ease the stress of long-term healthcare planning. 

“I just want that to be a much more respectful, mutual decision, so that everyone could have as sustainable a lifestyle as possible and take care of their loved ones,” she said.