The most experienced Healthcare AI team makes a great partner, loves seafood and occasionally waddles.
We have developed the first Full-Service AI platform built ground up for the healthcare industry. Penguin Ai helps Payers and Payviders automate their back office operations with a series of fine-tuned healthcare LLMs and Digital Workers. Our customers gain the ability to build, deploy and manage their evolving AI use cases, and to govern their data.
Our new Gen AI healthcare startup is led by Fawad Butt, former Chief Data Officer at Kaiser Permanente and United Healthcare/Optum. Our executive team boasts over 100 years of collective healthcare experience, numerous publications and six books in healthcare AI. The team recognized the challenges payers and hospitals face in developing their own infrastructure to deploy AI solutions, often taking an average of 18 months to bring a single AI solution to life. In response, Penguin Ai has developed a comprehensive platform that enables clients to go live with AI solutions in just 90 days. The platform is flexible, allowing for the integration of Penguin Ai’s healthcare models, third-party models, or even public models. Penguin Ai is already collaborating with some of the largest payers, major hospitals, and health systems.
Leadership
Fawad Butt
Co-Founder and CEO
Fawad served as the Chief Data Officer at Kaiser Permanente, United Healthcare, and Optum, leading the industry’s largest team of data and analytics experts and managing a multi-hundred-million dollar P&L. At Optum, he was responsible for overseeing the end-to-end data and analytics capabilities, platforms, products, tools and services across the enterprise. Under his leadership, his team modernized key data and analytics capabilities to support the ever-evolving analytical needs across the UHG and Optum businesses. More about Fawad.
Fawad fostered a culture of innovation across the analytics ecosystem, encouraged experimentation with new methods and technologies, and invested in talent and tools to deliver a robust digital foundation for the enterprise, enabling best-in-class care and cost outcomes for the $60M UHG members. Prior to UHG, Fawad served as the Chief Data Governance & Chief Data Officer at Kaiser Permanente. At Kaiser, Fawad helped define the industry’s most robust Data Governance Model, led an enterprise wide Data Privacy & Security initiative, and built the foundational data and analytics capabilities which allowed Kaiser to be market leading in digital care delivery for years to follow. Prior to starting Penguin Ai. Fawad was an Executive-in-Residence at Canvas Ventures, a venture capital firm with $3B under management. During his time at Canvas, he worked closely with the Managing Partners to evaluate healthcare investments and help the firm drive a data analytics, AI and machine learning thesis. He was involved with the following portfolio companies as a board observer and technical leader: Particle Health, Vida Health and PineCove Health.
Kishore Ayyadevara
Co - Founder and Chief AI Officer
Kishore is a hands-on leader with deep interest in leveraging Data and AI to identify, communicate and solve business problems and Applied AI. He built AI capabilities into multiple products across Risk and Quality, Care Management, Utilization Management and OptumRx teams at UnitedHealth Group (UHG), which resulted in a total annual savings/ incremental revenue of $250M. As a Data and AI leader, he has consulted for Elevance Health/Anthem leveraging Gen AI within operations and workflow. More about Kishore.
Prior to UHG, Kishore worked in the Risk Management team at American Express and the Transportation Analytics team at Amazon post his MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Kishore has filed 10 patents at the intersection of AI, Healthcare and Operations and has written 5 books on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Vamsi Bhandaru
Co - Founder and Head of Technical Implementation
Vamsi is a transformational tech leader who has a long history building and launching intelligent applications that solve impactful customer pain points. As Associate Director of AI Products & Platforms at UnitedHealth Group (UHG), he has led teams who have created AI-powered products to help departments achieve widespread digital transformation. He has stood up and led numerous engineering and development teams at Black Knight Financial Services and ADP. More about Vamsi.
Srinivas Raju
Co - Founder and Head of Engineering
Srinivas is a Data Engineering Executive with over 17 years of experience in architecting, designing and developing data warehousing, big data, cloud and analytics solutions. He served for over 10 years in various roles at UnitedHealth Group (UHG), and spent time at the Royal Bank of Scotland and Dell. A well-regarded technical manager who can attract, manage and build out large engineering teams with his people-centric approach, he specializes in building and delivering A-class cutting-edge solutions. More about Srinivas.
Peter Longo
Head of Sales
Peter Longo began his career at McKesson, where he played a pivotal role in building and scaling sales teams during the company's major expansion into hospitals. Known for his ability to create high-performing sales organizations, Peter's success at McKesson led to his next venture at Sunquest, where he was SVP of Sales and Marketing. At Sunquest, he helped grow the company into a leader in hospital lab, radiology, and pharmacy software, with the business successfully being acquired by Vista Equity Partners. More about Peter.
Peter has since continued to influence the healthcare tech space, working with companies like Higi, Sirono, Geneia, and PointClickCare to refine their go-to-market strategies and sales processes. He has also collaborated closely with Salesforce's healthcare vertical and advised investors on optimizing their portfolio companies' sales approaches. Passionate about the history of healthcare technology, Peter teaches at Loyola University and frequently speaks at industry conferences. Over the course of his career, he has built more than 25 strategic sales teams, including international teams, always with a focus on long-term success and innovation.
Missy Krasner
Board Advisor
Missy is a seasoned healthcare operator with 35+ years in the healthcare and digital health industry. She has worked at large technology companies (Amazon, Google, Box), startups, foundations, the U.S. government, and venture capital. She was one of the earliest Venture Chairs at Redesign Health, a venture studio that has launched and funded over 70+ healthcare startups. Prior to venture work at Redesign, she led healthcare teams at Amazon working across Amazon Care, Amazon Pharmacy, AWS Healthcare & Life Sciences and the Alexa Health & Wellness team. More about Missy.
Mission Statement:
To empower healthcare organizations to re-imagine complex workflows enabling them to provide the best-in-class services while complying with the industry’s leading policies.
Contact us to learn about Penguin Ai’s flexible, future-proofed Healthcare AI Platform today.