MedTech Veteran Chase Idleman Launches Age-Tech App Arlow

Chase Idleman resigned from his post as global vice president for technology and data at Zimmer Biomet in March 2025 and incorporated Arlow that same month. One year later, in April 2026, the app launched.

Arlow helps older adults and their families coordinate care, manage medications, organize important documents and plan for the aging journey. The platform sends reminders for medications, appointments and family events. Users can securely store, search and share insurance information, discharge papers and legal records, while family members track care needs and coordinate responsibilities.

Idleman, 44, is CEO of the Fort Worth startup. His route to entrepreneurship ran through a family business that no longer exists. His parents owned a fixed-wing ambulance company for 41 years, operating a fleet of airplanes that flew patients long distances from headquarters at Meacham Field. Idleman spent much of his youth in those hangars and expected to take over.

"I'm 44, about a year and a half ago, I had a midlife crisis," Idleman says. "And the midlife crisis was I never got to live the dream of the boy who took over his parents' business. I'm not getting any younger. If we're going to do this, let's go find a way."

His parents sold the business while he was building his own career. "They said second generations always screw it up. Go find your own way," Idleman recalls. "So that's the only reason I didn't go right back into it."

He took the advice. An Aledo High School graduate, Idleman became a medic and commercial pilot and studied entrepreneurship and marketing at Baylor University with an emphasis in family business before graduate school at the University of North Texas. He then spent two decades in medical technology — his first decade with Alcon, followed by Intuitive Surgical, where he managed its business with St. David's hospitals in Austin. He later joined an early-stage startup building robots for neurosurgery, particularly epilepsy procedures. Zimmer Biomet acquired that company in 2016.

Arlow's origin story ties back to Bill Loss, the company's chairman of the board and a chief investor. Loss came to Idleman with a problem from his own life: his parents' health was declining rapidly, and the caregiving tools he found were fragmented, difficult to use and poorly suited to his needs. That frustration became the impetus for the app.

Idleman sees a wide-open market. The app draws on the Four M's framework — What Matters, Mentation, Mobility and Medication — to guide its approach.

"Most people say, 'Hey, I'm going to go build this product.' They start working on it. We did it inversely," Idleman says. "We recognized massive market, and not a lot of companies in it. To give you some interesting numbers coming from MedTech, the space that I spent 20 years: There's 6,500 companies in the U.S. in MedTech. There's less than 300 in this emerging space that we call age tech. It's an emerging space that is very, very new in the industry right now."

Arlow sells a consumer subscription and a separate enterprise offering. The enterprise model is the real wedge, Idleman says: distribution is the challenge all age-tech companies struggle with, and employer benefit plans solve it. The target market is the sandwich generation — people caring for both kids and older adults at the peak of their careers. "How can we help keep them at work, keep them focused and keep them supported?" he asks.

The product runs on two pathways. A human solution pairs users with a multidisciplinary team anchored by certified senior advisers. A technology suite centers on a trained proprietary conversational AI for users who prefer to self-manage.

User research shaped the design. Older adults ranked loneliness as their number one problem. Caregivers and relatives worried more about coordination. "I may want to make sure Mom is ambulatory, getting up off the couch. My brother wants to make sure that she's got groceries in the cupboard. And then the paid caregiver's just like, 'I'm overworked and underpaid,'" Idleman says.

"Caregiving is deeply personal and often overwhelming," says Michelle Bianco, Arlow's chief experience officer. "Arlow is designed to feel like a true partner, bringing clarity to complexity and helping people take meaningful action without feeling alone in the process."

The roadmap includes medication management tools to flag potential drug interactions and lower costs, expanded emergency care tools and a marketplace for caregiving support.

"In an aging population where there's an enormous level of confusion and fragmentation, Arlow's job is to support and guide caregivers, employers, and older adults through that maze," Idleman says, "through a platform of solutions that make their lives easier and ultimately provides a system of action, allowing them to go do something with that information."

With fewer than 300 companies competing in U.S. age tech, against 6,500 in MedTech, Arlow's bet is that distribution through employers — not consumer marketing — will decide which players endure.