The path from founding a startup to advising a federal department is not a common one. Justin Fulcher made that jump after more than a decade building and scaling a healthcare technology company across international markets.
Two Careers, One Underlying Skill
His first venture, RingMD, started in 2013 when he was 21 and set out to link patients across Asia with doctors working remotely, closing a gap between fast-growing mobile phone use and slow-growing healthcare infrastructure. Fulcher spent years scaling that model across multiple countries before gradually stepping back from day-to-day management. He still sits on RingMD’s board and holds a minority stake, though he no longer runs its operations.
In early 2025, Fulcher joined the Department of Defense as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense. His work there centered on acquisition reform, an area where private-sector operators are sometimes brought in specifically because federal processes have grown too slow. Justin Fulcher contributed to reforms that cut software procurement timelines from years to months and helped modernize IT systems that many units had relied on for far longer than intended.
Justin Fulcher has described both chapters using similar language. In a LinkedIn post about public service, he wrote about favoring execution over narrative and accountability over optics, a framing that applies as easily to a telemedicine startup navigating foreign regulators as it does to a federal advisor navigating congressional oversight.
The common thread is comfort with constraint. Building healthcare technology in markets with unreliable infrastructure and reforming procurement inside a large bureaucracy both require patience with systems that resist quick fixes. Justin Fulcher’s current focus on defense technology and rare-earth supply chains, paired with ongoing doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins, suggests he intends to keep working at that particular intersection of private capability and public need. Refer to this article for additional information.
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