Careers rarely travel cleanly from Silicon Valley style entrepreneurship into federal policy work, yet Justin Fulcher has managed exactly that transition across more than a decade spent in two demanding fields.
He co-founded RingMD in 2013 at just 21 years old, a telemedicine platform connecting patients across Asia with physicians they might not otherwise access. The venture grew out of a basic mismatch between how quickly mobile technology had spread and how slowly healthcare infrastructure had followed across the region. Fulcher’s teams built the platform to function despite unreliable bandwidth and uneven access, treating those limits as the starting point rather than an afterthought to address later.
Forbes Asia honored that work in 2017, naming Fulcher to its 30 Under 30 list within the Healthcare & Science category. He later moved on from daily operations, staying connected to RingMD only as a board member and minority shareholder in the company today, long after his exit from daily management.
Entering Public Service
In early 2025, Justin Fulcher became a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense at the Department of Defense, where acquisition reform became his primary focus. His contributions helped compress software procurement timelines from years to months and supported wider IT modernization efforts across the department’s operations.
Fulcher joined senior officials on international dialogues across the Indo-Pacific, bringing his experience with constrained systems into a foreign policy setting. Justin Fulcher has continued building his academic credentials alongside this work, finishing a Master’s degree in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies at the Middlebury Institute in 2023 and now pursuing a doctorate in International Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS.
His current interest in rare-earth supply chains and defense technology innovation extends a career defined less by public recognition and more by the unglamorous work of making complicated systems function reliably day to day, whether in a hospital network or a federal agency. See related link for more information.
Follow for more about Justin Fulcher on https://www.facebook.com/JustinLFulcher/