As a student at Lafayette High School, Aaron Petty started his journey into entrepreneurship.
Back then, the Lexington, Kentucky-native launched a few smaller companies in the e-commerce space. That was pretty innovative for the time, considering it was 2009 — global e-commerce sales have since grown from half a billion dollars to more than $5 trillion in 2022.
Petty continued to pursue e-commerce while attending University of Kentucky, using his profits to help sustain himself through college.
"It was really just kind of drinking from a firehose," he said. "I learned on my own and was able to leverage that [experience] and started a travel company for Kentucky students for spring break."
That company was semi-successful, Petty said, but he left the commonwealth after he graduated to start a finance career in Atlanta. He began in private equity before moving on to corporate mergers and acquisitions for two large companies.
Petty later got back into entrepreneurship in 2018, launching Mitivate, an Atlanta-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. Mitivate, which has been largely bootstrapped, offers a platform that aims to streamline health care data management for hospitals and health plan providers.
The startup is planning to expand into Kentucky and open a second office in the Louisville region next year.
"While we were evaluating this new premise called 'value-based care,' people were really getting into the weeds ... to provide technology tools that allowed for all these new metrics to be evaluated and for these payments to be administered," he said. "And it was a huge idea that was going to fundamentally shape health care, but it was just taking a little bit longer than people anticipated. So I decided to go out there and launch the company myself."
The ultimate goal of value-based health care is to improve outcomes for patients by incentivizing and rewarding providers for the quality of care they provide, rather than the quantity.
The adoption of value-based models has been accelerating with both patients and providers. For example, 67% of Humana's Medicare Advantage plan members seek care from primary care physicians in value-based agreements. That's more than 2.6 million people.
It has built out a secondary infrastructure that allows for payers and providers to utilize its technology tool sets without having to leave the legacy systems that they're currently using, such as revenue cycle management.
The company has surpassed a "few million" in annual recurring revenue, Petty said, with $100,000 from angel investors. It recently got another $100,000 from Google For Startup's Black Founders Fund.
Mitivate, which has 16 full-time employees, is currently raising a seed round to fund its expansion into new markets.
"We've decided to go out there and enter into more markets, primarily in the Southeast, including Kentucky in 2023 and Ohio and Illinois in the Midwest," Petty said. "We need an office to service the Midwest, and I think Louisville is in a very strategic location in order to facilitate those processes."
Meanwhile, Petty has maintained his networks here in the Bluegrass State, pointing out the growth its startup ecosystem has seen in recent years and the rise of support organizations like Endeavor KY, IN, OH and Launch Blue.
Petty noted he was involved in the connection of XpressRun to Google, and he hopes its CEO Sada Wane will be the next Kentucky startup founder to get a piece of the GFS Black Founders Fund. While he may be in Atlanta — for now — Petty said he's more than happy to help make national connections for the companies looking to scale in his home state.
"Ultimately, if we're going to make it a successful state within technology, we all have to help each other out whenever we can," he said.
