Meet Justin Fulcher: From Coding at 7 to Advising the Pentagon

The Kid from Charleston

Justin Fulcher grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, writing code before most children his age had decided what they wanted to be. By thirteen, he had a company.

Carolina Software Solutions was a small web development firm; it entailed practical work, building websites for local small and medium-sized businesses. No investors, no pitch deck. Just a kid with technical skill and a city full of businesses that needed it applied.

That detail sets the pattern for everything that follows. Telehealth founder, government advisor, defense technology investor. The labels change, but the instinct underneath has been consistent since Charleston: identify a gap, build something that closes it, move on to the next one. "Entrepreneurship is something I've always done, not something I've simply been drawn to," Justin Fulcher has said. "I learned my first coding language at age seven, and launched my first company as a teenager."

Since then, Fulcher's professional achievements have all reflected a variation of the same principle: find a problem; build a solution.

From Clemson to Southeast Asia

In 2010, Justin Fulcher enrolled at Clemson University to study Computer Science. He left within a year — not because it was failing him, but because he had been running a business for five years and found the pace of formal education too slow for what he already knew he wanted to do.

What followed was a planned three-month trip to Southeast Asia that stretched into seven years. The region in the early 2010s was a study in contradiction: consumer technology was arriving faster than basic infrastructure. Smartphones were reaching places that still lacked functioning clinics, reliable electricity, and clean water. For a technology founder trained to spot the gap between what existed and what could be built, it demanded a response.

The decision to stay wasn't impulsive — it was the same calculation he had been making since he was thirteen. The problems here were simply larger than anything Charleston had offered him.

How Justin Fulcher Built RingMD

The moment that crystallized what the next seven years would produce came in Indonesia. Fulcher came across a man drinking water from the ground. The man had an Android smartphone. He spoke decent English. He had connected to the modern world in one sense while remaining entirely cut off from it in another.

A different kind of traveller might have moved on. Fulcher started taking notes. "I saw that trend and also a variety of big needs, such as the need for basic healthcare access," he said, "and I thought, why can't we fuse the two and actually build a platform that brings healthcare, through a smartphone, to a rural environment?"

He didn't launch a campaign or write a policy paper. He opened a code editor.

What became RingMD started with no name, no corporate structure, and no external funding. It was a working prototype of a platform that could connect patients with doctors remotely — built by hand, tested against a real problem, iterated without an audience. Investors found their way to it.

"For a number of months, it was essentially a hobby project," Fulcher has recalled. "And then, very quickly, we were approached by some investors, and that kind of triggered the conversation of — wow, actually what we're building here is something that could have a very big, profound impact on the world."

Scaling RingMD

Fulcher incorporated RingMD in Singapore: well-positioned geographically, English-speaking, and built for exactly the kind of international commercial activity he was standing up. He ran Kinda International, a technology solutions firm, in parallel, giving him the operational grounding to run a serious business while RingMD found its footing.

By 2016, RingMD held 1.5 million patient records across more than fifty countries and worked with 10,000 healthcare providers. Clients included governments, hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical firms. The platform's most consequential partnership was with the Indian government under the Digital India programme, through which RingMD built a healthcare access gateway reaching 883 million rural residents. Microsoft named the technology founder a Data Culture Champion in Asia. In 2017, Forbes placed Justin Fulcher on its 30 Under 30 Asia list. That kind of recognition reflected not just the platform's reach but the evolution of telehealth from a fringe experiment into something governments and health systems were taking seriously.

The bigger challenge was never technical. It was persuading clinicians, regulators, and hospital administrators that remote healthcare was real medicine rather than a novelty. Consumer demand was immediate; in markets where a video consultation was the only alternative to no care at all, patients needed no convincing. Institutions were harder.

"This is not a replacement for in-person," Justin Fulcher told skeptical practitioners across every market RingMD entered. "This is an augmentation to what you're currently doing." Every new market presented its own threshold for trust, and crossing it required the same work every time.

"Telehealth didn't become real because the technology finally arrived," Fulcher has said. "The technology arrived many times. Telehealth became real when systems started treating distance as an ordinary condition rather than a special exception."

The platform also integrated artificial intelligence modules — clinical decision support tools and screening capabilities built to operate within the strict privacy frameworks that regulated demand.

Sale, Relaunch, and COVID

In 2018, Fulcher sold a majority stake in RingMD and spent roughly a year managing the transition, including moving the company's headquarters from Singapore to Boston. He returned to Charleston in early 2020. Within weeks, COVID-19 had arrived, and with it, the moment that removed the option of treating remote healthcare as optional.

The sale itself reflected a principle the technology founder has written about directly: that building things that last sometimes means knowing when to bring in partners positioned to carry the work further than its current structure allows.

Institutions that had resisted telehealth for years implemented it almost overnight. The pandemic didn't create the argument for remote healthcare. It simply exhausted the counterargument. "I've seen almost 10 years of progress happen in a matter of months," the technology founder said in mid-2020.

RingMD, relaunched in the US as a turnkey government-focused telehealth platform, earned FedRAMP Moderate authorization and HIPAA and FISMA compliance. In July 2021, the Indian Health Service awarded the platform its first dedicated telehealth contract, serving approximately 2.6 million American Indian and Alaska Native individuals across 24 hospitals, 51 clinics, and 37 states. The platform had been designed from the beginning to function in low-bandwidth environments; it turned out that was exactly what the Indian Health Service needed.

The Same Challenge, Different Institution

In 2023, Justin Fulcher co-founded the Palmetto Initiative in South Carolina — a workforce development programme focused on bringing programming education into the state's public schools. The motivation traced back to a visit to Allendale, SC, where he met a student named Maya who wanted to become a software engineer but whose school lacked the resources to support that path. "Her story is not unique," Fulcher wrote. "It's a story shared by many children across our state."

From there, Fulcher moved into public service through the Department of Government Efficiency under President Trump, first at the Department of Veterans Affairs, then as DOGE lead at the Defense Department. In April 2025, he was promoted to Senior Advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, joining a new Pentagon leadership team focused on acquisition reform and defense modernization. As a technology founder and public sector advisor, he brought to Washington the same instinct he had applied across regulated environments for a decade: identify the institutional drag, work through it, make the core systems operate.

He departed on July 19, 2025. Fulcher has written about his decision to leave the Pentagon: "As planned, I've completed six months of public service to my country," Fulcher said in a statement released through the Defense Department. "Working alongside the dedicated men and women of the Department of Defense has been incredibly inspiring. Revitalizing the warrior ethos, rebuilding the military, and reestablishing deterrence are just some of the historic accomplishments I'm proud to have witnessed. Still, this is just the beginning. None of this could have happened without Secretary Hegseth's decisive leadership or President Trump's continued confidence in our team. I'm grateful to both, and to the extraordinary civilians and service members who turn vision into action every day. I will continue to champion American warfighters in all future endeavors and remain impressed by the work of the Department of Defense."

The Work Continues

Justin Fulcher today works as a defense technology investor and public sector advisor focused on national security and defense modernization, including defense spending reform and the modernization of core systems across America's defense infrastructure. Now based in Washington, he is pursuing a doctorate in International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS, building on a Master's degree in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

The through-line from a child learning to code in Charleston to a senior advisor at the Pentagon is not as surprising as it might appear. Across every context — building companies in Singapore, navigating regulated environments across fifty countries, serving as a public sector advisor inside Washington's most consequential institutions — the operating instinct has remained constant: find where systems are failing the people they're supposed to serve, build something that fits inside the constraints, earn the trust of institutions that resist it, and do the work until it holds.

"Over time, I've become less interested in celebrating outcomes," Fulcher has said, "and more interested in studying what endures."

For a technology founder and public sector advisor who started at seven and hasn't stopped building since, that sounds less like a conclusion and more like a mandate.