Healthcare IT · Physician scheduling

Durate

A Rice University dropout team's software that writes physician and resident schedules from rules typed in plain English. Backed by Y Combinator since 2024, still a team of two, with no FDA record, no clinical trial and no public funding figure attached to its name.

From a dorm room to a scheduling grid

By the founders' own account, Durate did not start as a company. It started as two Rice University students who met in their first weeks on campus, moved into an abandoned office they found on the college's grounds, and spent weekends there instead of going to class. They were building something else at the time. Then they noticed a pattern in their own families.

Both Michael Mounajjed and Benjamin Liu have physicians close to them. Mounajjed's parents are both doctors, and his mother works in the internal medicine residency program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Liu's sister is a chief resident at Cambridge Health Alliance, where, according to the founders, she spends a large share of her time scheduling other residents. Watching that frustration, the pair switched projects, skipped their internships the following summer, rented a one-bedroom apartment, and built a scheduling tool for people they knew personally.

That first version was named Docflow. It launched inside Harvard's Psychiatry Residency program, according to the company's Y Combinator profile, before the founders renamed the company Durate.

The problem: doctors doing Excel instead of medicine

The company's pitch rests on a specific complaint: physicians and residency administrators lose enormous amounts of time to back office scheduling, an area the founders say software vendors have largely ignored in favor of patient facing tools. "Doctors spend almost 20% of their working hours (and plenty more in additional hours) doing administrative work," the company wrote in its Y Combinator launch post, a figure it says it saw firsthand through family members who are doctors.

Durate's answer is what it calls "dynamic" scheduling: an administrator writes rules and preferences in ordinary English, such as accounting for a provider who prefers Friday shifts or another who is on leave, and the system regenerates a full schedule automatically as circumstances change. The company contrasts this with two older approaches it says dominate the market: static rules-based generators that require heavy manual upkeep, and higher priced "static with services" tools where a vendor's consultants reconfigure the system by hand every time a program changes.

Two dropouts, a crypto rig, and a Rice accelerator

Mounajjed grew up in Middleton, Wisconsin, and built an earlier company, Calceus Mining, while still in high school, helping others mine cryptocurrency rather than trading it himself. FOX6 News in Milwaukee covered him in February 2024, reporting he had won Junior Achievement's Young Entrepreneur Live competition in 2022 and had since started at Rice on an engineering and applied math track. At that point his active project was a different startup, a campus social app called Bonfire, not Durate. He and Liu, who led Rice's largest software engineering student group, met at Rice and later dropped out together to build Durate full time.

Rice's own accelerator, the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, put the pair through its 2024 Summer Venture Studio program, which gives each team $15,000 in equity free funding. A Rice News writeup from September 2024 named Durate, then still called Docflow, as "the first Rice student startup to be accepted into Y Combinator."

A wide bench of angels, no institutional round on record

Durate's own about page lists a long roster of individual backers rather than a venture fund: former NFL quarterback Joe Montana (through Liquid 2 Ventures), Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian, Wayfinder founder Yuri Sagalov, Zeus co-founder Kulveer Taggar, and more than a dozen other founders, operators and fund partners, including a partner at Orange Collective, the seed fund tied to Y Combinator alumni. No dollar amount for any check, and no total raised, appears anywhere the company has published, and no Securities and Exchange Commission Form D notice under the names Durate or Docflow turned up in a search of EDGAR as of September 2026.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the founders, their Rice and Y Combinator lineage, and their long angel list check out against independent sources. The operating claims, a named hospital customer, thousands of providers, over 100 sites, and specific EHR integrations, all come from Durate's own site and have not been confirmed elsewhere. No public record shows how much money the company has raised.

What to watch

• Whether Durate or an affiliated entity files a Form D, which would be the first public figure on how much it has raised.
• Any independent confirmation, from Brown Emergency Medicine or another named group, of the customer and scale claims on Durate's site.
• Team size, which stood at 2 as of Tracxn's August 2026 snapshot, two years after the Y Combinator batch.
• A Series A or seed announcement naming institutional investors, which the company has not made as of this writing.

In their words

Related companies

• BloomAPI: Also in Healthcare IT. A Y Combinator company that set out to end the medical records fax, then quietly turned into a HIPAA texting app
• H1: Also in Healthcare IT. A New York company that keeps a profile of roughly every doctor on earth and sells it to pharma, health insurers and now AI developers
• CoVerified: Also in Healthcare IT. A Boston software company that built COVID-19 testing, vaccine and symptom compliance tools for schools, employers and nursing homes during the pandemic
• Lively: Also in Healthcare IT. A San Francisco company that rebuilt the health savings account around the person who has to use one, then sold that machinery to banks and employers

Sources

1. IndependentLilie showcases 8 student startups that are making a difference in their industriesRice News · Sep 20, 2024
2. IndependentWisconsin college student hopes new app will catch fireFOX6 News Milwaukee, Ben Handelman · Feb 26, 2024
3. Platform recordDurate: Automated physician scheduling, company profileY Combinator · accessed Sep 25, 2026
4. AggregatorDurate company profile, team and competitorsTracxn · accessed Sep 25, 2026
5. Public recordEDGAR company search, term "durate," Form DSEC · accessed Sep 25, 2026, no matching filer
6. Public recordEDGAR company search, term "docflow" Form DSEC · accessed Sep 25, 2026, no matching filer
7. CompanyDurate, AI Physician Scheduling Software, home pagedurate.com · accessed Sep 25, 2026
8. CompanyAbout Us, Making Medical Software Magicaldurate.com · accessed Sep 25, 2026
9. Company5 Best Physician Scheduling Software in 2026 (Ranked)durate.com blog, Michael Mounajjed · Aug 21, 2026
10. InvestorDurate portfolio pageOrange Collective · accessed Sep 25, 2026