AKASA
Software & Data
South San Francisco, CA
Overall Rank: 264
Category: Software & Data
Category Rank: 50
Profile
AKASA is the leading developer of AI for healthcare operations. AKASA scales human intelligence with leading-edge AI and ML securely trained on customer data to learn unique systems, continuously adapt to changing environments, and deliver comprehensive automation and analytics for complex workflows. The result is a seamlessly integrated, customized solution that reduces operating costs, frees up staff to do the work they love, and helps health systems allocate resources to where they matter most.
AKASA’s customer base includes 475+ hospitals and health systems, 8,000+ outpatient facilities (across all 50 U.S. states), and represents more than $110 billion in aggregate net patient revenue.
Having a research-first approach, AKASA publishes rigorous validation of its technology at top peer-reviewed AI conferences, such as the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Summit, and the Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference (MLHC). Through its research, AKASA creates state-of-the-art models and standards across various areas of medical billing, including predictive denials of medical bills and autonomous medical coding from clinical notes.
Founded in 2019, AKASA is a remote-first workplace with 250 employees located all over the U.S.
Visit: www.akasa.com
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Key Executives
Malinka Walaliyadde, CEO, Co-founder, and Board Member
Prior to AKASA, Walaliyadde was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a $16.5B venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley. While there, he helped start and build their healthcare investment team, which focused on investments at the intersection of software and healthcare. He worked on almost 20 investments totaling over $250M in deal value. Walaliyadde previously worked at Corning Life Sciences, Counsyl, and on the healthcare team at Deloitte. He has previously been named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list and holds a bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering, graduating cum laude with honors from Cornell University.
Varun Ganapathi, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer, Co-founder, and Board Member
Ganapathi has a bachelor’s in physics and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. During his time at Stanford, he focused on machine learning and computer vision. His doctoral thesis was the basis of his first company, Numovis, which was acquired by Google. After his time at Google as a research scientist, Ganapathi went on to create Terminal.com, which was acquired by Udacity.
Ben Beadle-Ryby, SVP, Commercial, and Co-founder
Beadle-Ryby has nearly 15 years of experience as a healthcare economist, specializing in technology and consulting solutions to address financial challenges for hospitals and health systems. Prior to AKASA, Beadle-Ryby was a partner at the Advisory Board Company and at Optum, leading revenue cycle consulting growth and delivery. During his career, he has worked with more than 200 provider organizations across the country, delivering long-term operational improvements. Beadle-Ryby has a degree in mathematical economics from Colorado College.
Ryan Roland, Chief Financial Officer
Roland has more than 20 years of experience in financial operations and management of high-tech companies. Prior to AKASA, he served as CFO at Honor Technology where he helped guide the company through $210M in equity financing, $300 million in debt financing, and four acquisitions, including Home Instead, creating a combined organization representing over $2 billion in home care services revenue. Prior to Honor, Roland was CEO of Teespring, a commerce platform for building brands, which sold more than $800M of products during his tenure there. He also held senior finance roles at Jive Software and SuccessFactors.
Phil Walsh, Chief Marketing Officer
Walsh has more than two decades of healthcare sales and marketing experience. Most recently, he worked at Cognizant, a Fortune 200 technology and services company, as the global head of field marketing, overseeing a team of 200+ marketers and reporting directly to Cognizant’s CMO. At Cognizant, Walsh led marketing efforts across multiple industries, with a primary focus on healthcare technology offerings, including directly overseeing all marketing efforts at TriZetto, a Cognizant company. Prior to Cognizant, he worked in medical device, pharmaceutical, and healthcare software in a variety of sales and marketing leadership roles. Walsh has a bachelor’s degree from Clemson University and an MBA from Wingate University.
Customer Insights
“Payer changes around preauthorization requirements and increased demand to schedule diagnostic procedures as soon as possible is driving significant volumes for financial clearance. Hiring to handle these volumes can be challenging and isn’t always the most strategic solution. Machine-learning-based technologies such as AKASA have been critical to ensuring our teams can provide rapid turnaround for verifying eligibility and securing an authorization.” – Cynde McCall, Director of Patient Access and Health Information, Methodist Health System
“AKASA has been an innovative partner, bringing deep expertise of clinical and operational workflows to our automation efforts. The alignment in focus for both teams and the efficiency of deployment has made this a highly effective collaboration.” – Scott Abram, Vice President of Revenue Cycle, Sutter Health
