Healthcare IT · Clinical data exchange
BloomAPI
A Y Combinator company that set out to end the medical records fax, then quietly turned into a HIPAA texting app. The records product is gone. The corporate entity still sells software in 2026.
A 4.5 gigabyte file nobody could open
Every week the federal government published the National Provider Identifier file: the name, business address, affiliations and taxonomy codes of essentially every clinician in the United States. Free to download, and about 4.5 gigabytes, which meant almost nobody used it.
In September 2013 a Seattle engineer named Michael Wasser put the obstacle to Healthcare IT Today: the data was not huge, but it was too big for Excel or to casually drop into an application. So he wrote software that loaded it, indexed it, and answered queries over HTTP, put the code on GitHub, and gave the API away.
“I hope that with the launch of BloomAPI developers will never again skip over clinician lookup functionality because its too much work to build or because they have to pay for better access to this open data,” he wrote underneath the article that covered it.
That is where the name came from. The company that grew out of it went somewhere else entirely.
The fax problem
American medicine still moves paper. When a patient changes doctors or gets referred, the chart is printed and faxed, mailed, or carried by hand. BloomAPI put a number on it: the US health system spends $2.5 billion a year just transferring records, and nearly half of requested records never reach the doctor who asked. Both figures came from the company, repeated in the 2017 coverage.
The interesting part of the pitch was what it refused to promise. Everyone else sold interoperability. BloomAPI sold the opposite: leave the workflow alone, leave the consent forms alone, replace only the pipe.
The software installed into a clinic for free and sat on top of whatever record system was already there, including ones written in MUMPS and Progress. Money came from the other side: insurers and vendors paid for API access to a product called ChartPull. By mid 2017 BloomAPI said it had 300 doctors in the network, covering more than a million patients, with five employees in Belltown.
The founder had done healthcare twice already
Wasser sold his previous software company, Raveld, to the Seattle IT cost management firm Apptio, according to The Seattle Times. He then helped launch HealthSherpa, built during the first Affordable Care Act enrollment period to make buying a plan work when the federal exchange did not.
He left after that first open enrollment closed and wrote down why. Insurance mattered, he argued, but it was a US specific problem, and which website you bought a plan on did not change how long you lived. “I’ve realized that I would prefer to spend my time focused on individuals and the ways in which they receive care,” he wrote.
BloomAPI, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware in 2015, according to its later SEC filing.
Two filings, then a press release
The company went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2017 batch, and the paperwork arrived first. On March 13, 2017 it filed a Form D for a $750,000 offering of equity and debt, first sale March 3, $145,000 sold, three investors. Fourteen days later came a second Form D for $2,500,000 of equity and options, first sale March 22, $250,000 sold, four investors. Wasser is the only related person named on either.
The announcement came 108 days after that second filing. On July 13, 2017 BloomAPI said it had raised $2.4 million led by Founders’ Co-op, with Y Combinator, Slow Ventures, Section 32, Liquid 2 Ventures, Fifty Years Fund, TWB Investment Partnership, Wei Fund and Parker Conrad. Five outlets covered it. In August it posted on Hacker News that it was hiring engineers to, among other things, extract structured data from handwritten doctor notes.
The pivot that was never announced
Then the story stops being about records.
By the time the Internet Archive captured bloomapi.com on September 25, 2018, the site listed exactly one product, and it was not ChartPull. It was BloomText, a HIPAA compliant messaging app. The team page showed six people, Wasser as CEO.
By January 18, 2019 the domain no longer served a page of its own. The Archive’s crawler got an HTTP 302 pointing at bloomtext.com. Checked again on September 22, 2026, bloomapi.com still redirects, now with a 301, and the old public data API path goes with it.
There was no acquisition release and no shutdown notice. The legal entity kept going under a different product name. BloomAPI, Inc. is still the seller of record on the App Store listing and the data controller named in the BloomText privacy policy.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| SEC filings | Two filings under CIK 0001699329, both Form D, Mar 13 and Mar 27, 2017. Combined offered $3,250,000, sold at filing $395,000. No amendment, nothing since. | Public record |
| Announced versus filed | The reported $2.4M has no matching Form D entry; EDGAR shows $395,000 sold. Regulation D requires no amendment for later sales inside a noticed offering, so this is a reporting artifact, but the closed round never appears in the record. | Claim differs from filing |
| The pivot | Archive capture of Sep 25, 2018 lists BloomText as the only product. Capture of Jan 18, 2019 shows bloomapi.com returning an HTTP 302 to bloomtext.com. Live check Sep 22, 2026 returns a 301. | Public record |
| Acquisition or wind down | None found. EDGAR full text search for “BloomAPI” returns two documents, both the company’s own 2017 Form D notices. No acquirer has ever named it in a filing. | Not found |
| Corporate continuity | BloomAPI, Inc. is the seller and copyright holder on the BloomText iOS listing and the data controller in its privacy policy, at 300 Lenora Street #963, Seattle. | Public record |
| Current scale | BloomText’s own site counts 21K users, 295K patients, 28M messages sent and 30K video calls. Its LinkedIn page says “Trusted by 300K+ users for 10+ years.” The two company figures do not agree with each other. | Company figures disagree |
| Headcount | Tracxn lists 3 employees as of July 31, 2026 and $3.17M raised across 5 rounds, more than any reported round. LinkedIn lists 2 to 10 employees. | Aggregator |
| Directory listing | The Y Combinator company page still describes moving medical records off fax and couriers. The live product is a texting app. | Listing differs from product |
Read plainly: the ambitious part of BloomAPI did not survive, and the company did not pretend otherwise so much as never say anything at all. What replaced it is small, real and priced in public: a free tier, $14.50 per user per month, patient SMS from $129 a month, a signed business associate agreement on every plan. That is a working software business run by a handful of people. It is not the repository of health data the 2017 hiring post described.
What to watch
- Any new Form D. The last was filed March 27, 2017, so a new notice would be the first sign of fresh outside capital in nearly a decade.
- Whether the open source project is revived or handed off. The repositories are still public, but the hosted API endpoint now redirects.
- Whether BloomText publishes a consistent user count. Its site and LinkedIn page give numbers an order of magnitude apart.
- The problem itself, now worked by Particle Health, Health Gorilla and Metriport on national networks rather than clinic by clinic.
In their words
“I hope that with the launch of BloomAPI developers will never again skip over clinician lookup functionality because its too much work to build or because they have to pay for better access to this open data.”
Michael Wasser, Healthcare IT Today, 2013 · Independent
“I’ve realized that I would prefer to spend my time focused on individuals and the ways in which they receive care.”
Michael Wasser, personal blog, 2014 · Founder
“Doctors hear ‘interoperability’ and say this will come but it never actually shows up.”
Michael Wasser, CEO, TechCrunch, 2017 · Independent
“A lot of times they don’t actually make it to the person who is meant to receive the record.”
Michael Wasser, The Seattle Times, 2017 · Independent
“While BloomAPI is now a company with a different focus, this project is still actively maintained”
BloomAPI repository README, GitHub · Company
“BloomText is the nervous system for my business. It helps us differentiate ourselves in terms of our communication and our quality of care.”
Clinical Director, Acute Care, bloomtext.com, 2026 · Company site
“Bloomtext works well for very small healthcare teams that mainly need free, compliant internal chat and only text patients occasionally.”
Falkon SMS review, 2026 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, BloomAPI, Inc., CIK 0001699329, accession 0001699329-17-000001
- Public recordForm D, BloomAPI, Inc., CIK 0001699329, accession 0001699329-17-000002
- Public recordEDGAR full text search for BloomAPI
- Public recordInternet Archive capture index for bloomapi.com
- IndependentBloomAPI locks down $2.4M to fix medical record releases
- IndependentHealth technology startup BloomAPI raises $2.4M to get medical records off paper
- IndependentSeattle startup BloomAPI helps health clinics phase out faxes
- IndependentKiller NPI API, BloomAPI
- IndependentTop Bloomtext Alternatives in 2026
- FounderPost on leaving HealthSherpa
- CompanyBloomAPI (YC W17) Is Hiring, Seattle
- Companyuntoldone/bloomapi repository
- AggregatorBloomText company profile, funding and employee count
- Companybloomapi.com product and team page, archived capture
- CompanyBloomText home page, pricing page and privacy policy
- CompanyBloomText App Store listing, seller BloomAPI, Inc.
- CompanyBloomText company page
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
