Sameday Health: The Story Behind the Rise

Long before Felix Huettenbach became known as the founder of Sameday Health, he was a ten-year-old asking his parents for something unusual: a year of training at a Shaolin monastery in China. Inspired by Jackie Chan and a fascination with discipline over talent, Felix spent that year in a grueling routine of body and mind — martial arts at dawn, English lessons for the other students in the afternoon, and a daily lesson in resilience that would quietly shape every venture he built afterward. It wasn't a health company or a tech startup that taught him his first lesson in operating under pressure. It was a monastery.

That instinct — to put himself in rooms where he wasn't the strongest, and to earn his place through discipline rather than talent — became the thread running through Felix's career. He studied Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration in Munich, paying his own way by founding an event production company at eighteen. At twenty, he moved to San Francisco to work at the German American Chamber of Commerce, building bridges between German and American tech leaders. From there, he co-founded a robotics fitness technology company in Boston alongside MIT students, earning visiting researcher status at MIT before selling his stake and relocating to Los Angeles. Each step added a new skill: engineering discipline, cross-border business development, and an operator's comfort with uncertainty.

By early 2020, Felix was Chief of Staff at Quantgene, working on liquid-biopsy cancer detection technology — deep in the world of healthcare innovation, but still one step removed from the front line. Then COVID-19 hit Los Angeles, and testing access collapsed overnight. Lines stretched for blocks. Results took a week or more to come back. For a virus that spread in days, a week-long wait wasn't just an inconvenience — it was a public health failure playing out in real time.

Felix saw the gap and made a decision that would define the next three years of his life: he would build the fast, reliable testing infrastructure that the moment demanded. Sameday Health opened its first clinic in Venice, California, with a simple promise baked into its name — testing and results that didn't take a week, but a day, or less.

What happened next is the part of the story most people who search for "Sameday Health" are really looking for. In a matter of months, a single clinic became a network. Felix and his team scaled Sameday Health to more than 2,000 employees and over 50 testing and care sites across major U.S. metro areas — Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Washington D.C., and Boston among them. By the time the most acute phase of the pandemic had passed, Sameday Health had helped more than 3 million Americans get tested, vaccinated, or seen for a medical visit, earning tens of thousands of five-star reviews along the way.

As the acute pandemic emergency eased, Felix and his team faced the question every crisis-born company eventually faces: what comes next? Rather than winding down, Sameday Health pivoted deliberately — from a single-purpose COVID-19 testing operation into a broader telehealth and primary care platform. Virtual primary care visits, mental health support and talk therapy, prescription management, IV therapy, and wellness services were added under a new banner: "Healthcare of the Future Today."

That bet paid off in the form of an acquisition: in 2023, Sameday Health was acquired by Rume Health, folding the testing-era brand and its patient base into the next chapter of accessible, tech-enabled healthcare. For Felix, it marked the close of an extraordinary three-year sprint — one that took a company from zero to a nationwide operation and a meaningful mark on how millions of Americans experienced healthcare during the hardest years of the pandemic.

Ask Felix what he took away from the Sameday Health years and the answer isn't a growth-hacking tactic or a fundraising story. It's closer to what he learned at ten years old in that monastery: enduring companies, like enduring people, are built by operators, not narrators. Today, based in Dubai, Felix has turned his attention to new ventures and personal milestones — including earning his Private Pilot's License and pursuing long-held interests in surfing, sustainability, and angel investing. But the Sameday Health chapter remains the clearest proof of the philosophy he's carried since childhood: put yourself where the problem is hardest, do the work most people won't, and let the results — three million patients served, thousands of jobs created, and a company built from nothing in the middle of a global crisis — speak for themselves.