This past week, it was publically annouced that Tundra Angels invested in Ours Privacy in their $15 million Series A led by Lightbank and Health Velocity Capital.

Ours Privacy is a marketing platform that helps healthcare companies do marketing while staying compliant - ultimately helping them do marketing on autopilot.

Ours Privacy is not only Tundra Angels' 25th portfolio company, but also is a unique one because for the first time, Tundra Angels invested in one of our own Tundra Angels members, Tyler Zey, Co-Founder and CTO of the company.

Greater Green Bay investors investing in one of our own Tundra Angels members makes this investment extra special.

The seed that eventually led to Tundra Angels’ investment in Ours Privacy in July 2026 was planted three years before when I met tech CTO, Tyler Zey, in Fall 2023.

I met Tyler in Green bay through a mutual connection. To set the stage, after growing up in the area and working in tech around the country, Tyler and his family had recently relocated back to Green Bay, Wisconsin.

I liked Tyler as a person, and liked his story. A former classically trained musician, he later pivoted into technology. He had founded, scaled, and exited a tech company in the real estate marketing space. He joined Tundra Angels as an investor in November 2023.

At the time Tyler, was CTO of a telehealth startup called Ours. I quickly gained respect for him, the insights that he brought during the pitch meetings, and the questions he asked. I have found Tyler to be always someone that is dialed in, asking the right questions and thinking about not only the technology case but also the business case. In addition to that, just a fun person where we could laugh together as well as a good friend.

Over the years, Tyler and I would periodically connect over coffee. At one point, he suggested that we meet up.

Over this coffee chat, Tyler detailed how Ours went through a tremendous pivot. The company had pivoted out of telehealth couples therapy into marketing technology. I still remember the conversation.

At the time, the pivot to me seemed very out of place. But Tyler said that they had strong traction out of the gate and was excited about the renewed direction.

Up until that time, I never thought about Tundra Angels investing in the company. But that changed with another conversation a number of months later.

In this conversation, in July 2025, Tyler said, “The market is opening up to us.”

Tyler went out to describe how their team designed the product such that is was extremely easy for healthcare organizations to implement the Ours Privacy product. As I well knew, in healthcare, solutions that can be implemented in minutes are nearly hard to come by.

Hmmm. I liked what I was seeing.

I asked Tyler if he was fundraising. He said that they weren’t yet.

I thought, “Well, perhaps we'll have an opportunity at some point.”

Earlier this year, Tyler and I were texting back and forth. Then, he sent me this text:

I did a fist pump in the air. The moment I was waiting for. A ton still needed to be learned, but we had an angle on the opportunity, which was the first step.

Tyler then connected with Co-Founder and CEO, Jessica Holton. Jessica and I had a Zoom chat. The first chat with Jessica was a confirming moment for me. “Wow, I like this team a lot.”

Jessica is super commercial-focused and brought joyful energy. Up until that point, I had struggled to understand the full scope of the market problem. In my first conversation with Jessica, what stuck out to me was how tactfully she educated me on the problem.

✅ I think one of the strongest gifts that a CEO can have is the ability to sense any person, any audience, regardless of their experience in this space, and speak at just the right level of detail that in a very short amount of time, the audience has complete clarity on what is going on. ✅

It was undeniable from the first 15 minutes of our Zoom chat that Jessica clearly fully possessed this skill. In 15 minutes, I completely understood why the criticalness of this problem mattered to healthcare.

After a series of conversations, I continued to get more and more conviced that something special was afoot. This was independent of my relationship with Tyler. I didn’t think I owed anything to Tyler and I don’t think he thought he owed anything to me. As I talked with Jessica, I became more and more conviced about the opportunity. I asked Jessica and Tyler to pitch to Tundra Angels in May 2026.

At the time of the pitch, Jessica had communicated to me that a term sheet was very close, and yet she kept the name of the firms close to the vest.

Several days after the pitch, the team at Ours Privacy communicated to me that they secured Eric Ong from Lightbank and Saurabh Bhansali at Health Velocity Capital as their lead investors!

It couldn’t get any better. In an ironic twist, I met Eric at a conference several years before this, and we have exchanged startup deals over the years. The Ours Privacy team didn’t even know this until they talked with Eric and connected the dots!

The “mystery” lead investor that was about to issue a term sheet to the company we were considering turned out to be a Partner where we already shared mutual respect and deal opportunities.

It was as if another planet had aligned, strengthening the investment case in yet another way just when I already thought it couldn’t get any better… 😀

As I mentioned, Jessica Holton, Tyler Zey, and Adam Putterman were running a national telehealth platform that matched couples with couples therapists. When HHS issued new guidance saying tracking pixel data couldn't be shared with third party platforms without violating HIPAA, the team removed their own website pixels. Then, they immediately felt the hit to their marketing. They were flying blind with their marketing funnel.

Tyler, with his background of building and exiting a marketing tech product for real estate, built an internal tool to solve this problem. Essentially, it let the team keep tracking what they needed while stripping out health information before sending data out, so they could market compliantly.

Over time, other startup founders asked Jessica, Tyler, and Adam how they were solving this problem. When the team responded that they had built an internal tool, their founders got interested. “Can you do that for me too?”

Soon enough, the team had enough requests for this that the team made the pivot to healthcare marketing.

The team discovered this problem completely by accident, and built a solution to solve it, thinking that it was only good for their own use. It turned out they had discovered something far more valuable than they knew at the time.

The key was that Jessica, Adam, and Tyler, stumbled onto this problem by accident. This non-obvious insight into the problem means that the team had a bit of a built-in head start to getting to market. They were able to capitalize on it and build momentum around it with enough speed to become a market leader.

Tundra Angels has various opportunities to invest in many things in health care - medical devices, SaaS, platforms, etc. Each of those opportunities carries a varying value propositions - either generate revenue or cut costs, save time, or address intangible assets or liabilities for a set of actors in the market.

Yet, each of those opportunities also carries a level of context with it where that solution exists in their own domain - maybe a tech product is being sold to the billing department of a hospital system, or a physical product the ICU of a hospital, or hardware play to an orthopedic surgery center, etc. There is always a specific domain and use case attached to that given startup’s product.

✅ What struck Tundra Angels with Ours Privacy is that the domain and use case of revenue generation is not limited to a single domain, but rather all domains in a healthcare organization would benefit. ✅

Ours Privacy occupies the entire surface area of the entire foundamentation of

This is because the value of Ours Privacy starts at the very beginning - getting patients in the door to begin with.

If the healthcare marketers were lacking compliant tools to track bottom of funnel market events, which effectively leaves organizations “in the dark” about marketing performance, we knew that this wasn't a fad or a trend, or a trendy problem that had just come up. Ours Privacy was solving a foundational, first principles problem of a health care organization - getting patients in the front door. Without patients, nothing else would matter.

One of our Tundra Angels’ members noted in their due diligence, “A lot of software is useful but ultimately optional, but I don’t feel Ours is. Once it's implemented it becomes the layer that makes patient acquisition possible, sitting underneath the rest of the marketing stack rather than alongside it.”

A particular question was raised during our due diligence process on Ours Privacy. This individual was reading the headlines of all these major hyperscalers, OpenAI and Anthropic, eating up all these AI SaaS companies by seemingly one flick or pivot of data, and was concerned the same thing would happen to Ours Privacy.

The reason why Tundra Angels believed that this company was worth betting on was how we think about the "Risk of AI Displacement."

Here is how we think about it, and it relates to the role of AI in the solution itself.

✅ We consider, “Is the atomic unit of this startup opportunity based on AI, such that it would not be possible to be solved without AI?”

In this case, Category 1, AI is an enabler of the solution. Without AI, the solution isn’t possible.

Or, is the atomic unit of the startup opportunity based on some underlying technology, unique data, or the solve of a market problem that would still be significant, independent of AI?

In Category 2, AI is a force-multiplier of the solution. ✅

Category 1 and Category 2 both have different angles for due diligence. But I think there is something to be said for Category 2.

Ours Privacy is Category 2, AI is a force-multiplier of the solution.

Ours Privacy is an AI-native company whose value proposition is not predicated on AI alone. The compliance problem, the data anonymization, and infrastructure aggregation of the entire marketing stack would need to be solved regardless of whether AI existed. AI becomes the force multiplier of Ours Privacy, not the core enabler.

Going back to the question we received through our due diligence process, here is why this matters from an investment standpoint. In most AI startups, one can be displaced by someone who simply builds a better AI product or has access to better data. But what cannot be displaced easily is the customer base and the distribution. The press release announced this past week notes that Ours Privacy “works with over 200 providers, payers, digital health companies and more, including multi-billion-dollar healthcare organizations.”

These 200 customers and counting quickly are not buying Ours Privacy for their AI per say, but because it solves a mission-critical problem that undergirds the entire customer acquisition motion.

Now, where AI does become valuable is that because the product sits foundationally beneath the entire healthcare marketing stack, the more it's used, the stickier it gets. The more analytics a healthcare organization runs through Ours Privacy, the more embedded the product becomes in the marketing engine.

This compounding stickiness makes displacement increasingly difficult over time, which gave Tundra Angels confidence that there was a strong defensibility story being written.

One of our Tundra Angels investors works at a company that is very adjacent to Ours Privacy in the observability space. This person gave us an inside lane as it relates to the broader work that Ours Privacy is doing in the tech stack. This investor noted in their memo that,

“[For Ours Privacy] product-market fit looks unusually strong. Demand seems like genuine customer pull, not output of aggressive sales. Growth is driven by a real and growing problem. [This] points to a product customers actively want, not one they have to be talked into.”

In a world where we often hear that “healthcare is broken,” and the tectonic plates of healthcare are shifting underneath our feet, there is one constant that is going to remain:

Health care organizations need to find and acquire patients via their digital presence.

If health organizations are flying blind to be able to do that, it is going to put in jeopardy everything that a healthcare system does.

At the end of the day, healthcare marketers exist, yes, to generate revenue for the healthcare system or organization, but ultimately to get patients the help that they truly need - from the right healthcare organization, to the right clinic, to the right doctor.

Tundra Angels is excited to invest in Ours Privacy, the infrastructure that helps generate strong patient outcomes… by helping patients get in the front door to begin with.

A lot of founders and VCs that read this newsletter invest in the healthcare space. If you or one of your portfolio companies resonates with the problem that Ours Privacy solves, then reach out to them on their website here.

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