Mom tech entrepreneur creating agentic AI for rare-disease families
Farid Vij, CEO and Co-Founder of Citizen Health, and Nasha Fitter, Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder of Citizen Health.
Citizen Health
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When Nasha Fitter’s youngest daughter was diagnosed with FOXG1 syndrome, a rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorder, in 2017, she faced a challenge that many in the rare disease community unfortunately know all too well: little to no public information about the disease or how to manage it.
“There was nothing actually being done,” Fitter said. “Getting daily answers to my questions and problems I was facing was really unsystematic and random. I was basically going to Facebook and hoping someone would answer my question.”
At the time, Fitter was told there was no cure for the syndrome, no ongoing research, and no real roadmap for what might happen next for her daughter. To tackle this problem, he co-founded the FOXG1 Research Foundation to find a cure.
But Fitter, a technology entrepreneur, also saw an opportunity to improve the way rare disease patients receive care, which could speed up finding a cure.
Working with tech entrepreneur Farid Vij, the duo founded Citizen Health in 2023, aiming to create what Vij calls an “AI advocate” for the rare disease community.
“If you are a patient with a rare disease, the biggest thing that will benefit you is an advocate in your corner,” Vij said.
Often, this task falls to a parent or loved one due to a lack of information and resources regarding certain rare diseases.
“Thousands of families have a reason to not take no for an answer, so they’ll try to find the next doctor, start a foundation, or become scientists themselves and try to create gene therapy programs,” he said. “But most people can’t afford to do it or don’t know how to do it, and it’s really hard to democratize it.”
The impact of artificial intelligence on the healthcare industry
Vij said this development is great for people looking for information on common conditions and general healthcare. But for many rare disease patients, “there’s been no research, there’s no approved treatment, and even the top expert has only seen a few patients, so there’s nothing for the model to leverage,” he said. After all, that’s what causes many rare disease patients and their families to turn to Facebook and other groups, where they’re not even sure if the information they’re receiving is relevant.
This is a problem Citizen Health is trying to solve by creating one of the largest rare patient data networks of its kind. The AI-powered platform works with patients and rare disease advocacy groups to create communities for different conditions; It uses medical records, genetic information, and other patient-reported experiences to create a dataset that can be queried by those same patients, their families, or clinicians to find answers. Citizen Health also collects and curates data from consenting patients, providing access to researchers so they can advance drug development and treatments without further burdening the rare disease community.
Citizen Health said there are more than 8,000 rare disease patients on the platform to date, across more than 350 diseases. There are also more than 16 pharmaceutical companies using this data to advance treatments.
Using Citizen Health is free for patients, and they can choose to have their data accessible to researchers; Vij said 98.3% of patients currently prefer to share. If a researcher wants to access this data for commercial purposes, they pay Citizen Health, which shares a percentage of it with the patient.
“We’ve been able to shorten the timelines to bring these treatments to market, where they’re created 30 percent to 50 percent based on what patients need,” Vij said. “This is our dual mission: to use this aggregate data to help patients on a daily basis, and on the other hand, to use the same data to drive research so we can bring treatments to market faster.”
The company has raised $44 million since its 2023 launch, including a $30 million Series A funding round led by 8VC in August 2025. Other backers include Headline, Transformation Capital and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Nasha Ritter, Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder of Citizen Health, and her daughter Amaya, who was diagnosed with FOXG1 Syndrome, an extremely rare neurodevelopmental condition.
Citizen Health
Using agent AI to help rare disease patients
Now Citizen Health is taking its platform one step further; It introduces agency AI built specifically for rare disease patients, helping them schedule appointments, navigate insurance applications, alerting them when there’s something in their medical records that needs attention, and connecting them with similar patients and relevant clinical trials.
“In rare disease, a parent will spend an average of 53 hours a week caring beyond the ordinary parenting that anyone would need to do,” Vij said. “So this gives a lot of those hours back, but it also provides much better outcomes for patients because you learn from the collective wisdom of the community.”
Such tools and access can be critical for rare disease patients and their families who struggle to find the right care or roadmap to follow, said Fitter, who not only serves as the company’s chief operating officer but also uses it to help care for her daughter.
“Getting better care and making better decisions every day is a game changer for the individual patient,” he said. “Without Citizen for our foundation, we would not have dosed our first patient this year.”
At his organization, Fitter said Citizen Health’s data helps guide the endpoint of treatments, from seizures to movement disorders, and that the decision was made after being able to analyze medical data of other patients with FOXG1 syndrome. The foundation recently had a Type D meeting with the FDA and was allowed to use natural history data based on patients’ medical records as a placebo control arm, allowing it to skip the phase three trial and placebo, which Fitter said saved about $80 million.
“The biggest success is that the next patient who is just diagnosed will have a much easier life based on the studies we were able to do,” he said.
