Company leader
Rachel Mertensmeyer
Co-Founder and CEO
Rivia Health
Rachel Mertensmeyer is co-founder and chief executive of Rivia Health, a Phoenix, Arizona, company whose software lets patients see and pay their medical bills by text, phone or chat without logging into a portal.
Brand Management in New York and Shanghai
She earned a bachelor of arts in communication studies from Westmont College. She then spent more than a decade in product and brand management at Unilever and Avon in New York and at BBDO and WPP in Shanghai, China, where she managed billion-dollar brands.
Thirty-Eight Medical Bills
While she worked at Unilever, an injury left her with 38 medical bills from 11 providers and $10,000 of debt, which she financed with credit cards at 26 percent interest. "This problem of managing multiple bills across several different providers is much more common than you might think," she said later.
Founding RexPay
Six months after recovering, she moved to San Francisco, California, and joined the Launch Pad Digital Health accelerator. On a flight to visit family in Arizona she sat next to Al Castino, a retired Silicon Valley chief financial officer who became her first investor. She founded RexPay in February 2018 and based it in Phoenix, and the company later became Rivia Health.