Anil Kottoor and the business of getting unstuck

Anil Kottoor had been the person responsible for the systems. Then he became the person selling a better way to run them. The change sounds modest when reduced to a job title. Inside a large organization, it is a considerable journey: from living with the handoffs, applications and administrative machinery to asking somebody else to trust your version of the machinery.

By January 2014, that journey had a conspicuous number attached. Bain Capital Ventures and Spectrum Equity invested $77.5 million for minority stakes in MedHOK, the Tampa software company Kottoor founded and led. The business was still young. Its founder had already spent years in senior technology jobs.

The familiar entrepreneurial plot begins with an outsider spotting something the establishment has missed. Kottoor arrived with experience of the establishment’s applications. His working life had taken him through Oxford, Aetna, WellPoint and WellCare. He knew the organizational chart from the inside, including the places where a chart stops being much help.

Follow the career forward and a recurring subject appears: the connections between systems, suppliers and people. A product can be impressive by itself. Getting it to work with everything around it is another occupation altogether. Kottoor built businesses in that space.

An education in the handoff

His preparation combined a bachelor’s degree from Concordia College in New York with an MBA from Pace University. The subsequent executive record moves between application development, project services and responsibility for technology across an organization. Those are different vantage points on the same daily difficulty: getting work through a complicated institution.

From September 1997 to May 2002, he was vice president of IT application development at Oxford. A spell leading project services at Aetna followed, from June 2002 to January 2003. At WellPoint, he served as vice president and chief application development officer from June 2003 to November 2006.

On January 2, 2007, he joined WellCare as senior vice president and chief information officer. The appointment placed him above the existing senior technology executive in the reporting structure. It was a job concerned with the whole apparatus, rather than one application or project.

There is a useful distinction between knowing how software is written and knowing how an organization lives with it. His sequence of jobs brought him into both worlds. Read as a preparation for entrepreneurship, it offers a less romantic origin than the garage. It also offers a rather more practical one. Large organizations provide abundant opportunities to discover how many perfectly reasonable decisions can produce a thoroughly unreasonable process.

The years the numbers changed

MedHOK’s company history dates its founding to 2010. Kottoor became its president and CEO, taking responsibility for an enterprise software business that brought previously separated functions onto a shared platform. The proposition was integration: give organizations a more connected way to manage their work.

That can sound abstract until the growth figures arrive. In the 2014 Inc. 5000, MedHOK ranked No. 25 nationally. Its reported 2013 revenue was $17 million, following three-year growth of more than 9,109 percent. In Tampa’s ranking that year, it occupied the first position.

The following year’s account recorded $24.5 million in 2014 sales and a three-year growth rate of 540 percent. Its national ranking was No. 824. Both entries describe a growing business, although the percentages and positions belong to different measurement periods. Fast-growth lists have a talent for making the calendar look like an accounting exam.

For Kottoor, the period also brought outside capital. The $77.5 million investment announced in January 2014 came from two firms acquiring minority positions. The distinction matters. This was growth equity, rather than the later majority investment associated with Hearst. A founder’s career can contain several consequential transactions, each changing a different part of the company’s circumstances.

Buying the missing pieces

In April 2015, MedHOK acquired Continuum Performance Systems. The addition brought the Market Prominence product suite into the business, extending its reach into sales processing, enrollment, billing, member services and financial reconciliation. These are the business functions that make a platform useful well beyond its most polished demonstration.

The acquisition offers a concrete picture of Kottoor’s work as an operator. The company was bringing together complementary products and teams. CPS founder Brad Turley described the teams working toward a smooth transition and continued growth. The announcement also described an intention to keep investing in Florida, Connecticut and South Carolina.

In June 2016, Hearst announced an agreement to acquire a majority stake in MedHOK. Financial terms were undisclosed. Kottoor spoke about expanding the company’s reach and growth through the partnership. The prospective owner brought an established information business and a portfolio of specialist companies.

The leadership structure continued to develop. In December 2017, Gary D. Stuart became MedHOK’s president, reporting to Kottoor as CEO. That arrangement gives the founder’s title some useful context: the business now had another executive taking on its presidency. Expansion had produced a more layered management job. Building the software and building the organization around the software had become visibly separate responsibilities.

A familiar cast, a different company

The later chapters contain some familiar names. At FutureRx, Mark Francen’s product-development biography includes six years at MedHOK. Salome Isbell’s financial leadership experience includes serving as MedHOK’s CFO. Their histories connect the companies through work already done together, rather than through a founder’s name alone.

RevDoc’s leadership page adds another connection. Isbell appears there as CFO, while Marc Ryan is listed as executive advisor and compliance and policy officer. Ryan had been a founding executive at MHK, including service as president and a long tenure in strategy and compliance.

These biographies provide a human counterweight to the transaction chronology. A company is also the people who know why a product behaves a certain way, which customer request took six months to resolve, and where a financial model becomes optimistic. Such knowledge travels with a person more readily than it fits into an acquisition announcement.

In June 2023, FutureRx appointed Eric Grossman chief commercial officer, with responsibilities spanning commercial strategy, product and partner development, marketing, sales and customer service. The appointment widened the team around Kottoor’s next platform. The founder remained central, but the job of turning a platform into a business was distributed among people with distinct responsibilities.

The freedom to change your mind

FutureRx’s public platform launch in February 2023 put a particular organizational frustration near the center of its proposition: dependence on outsourced suppliers. Kottoor described a model intended to simplify the work of selecting, contracting with and managing external service relationships.

The company offered modular technology alongside a marketplace of integrated partners. Its launch materials emphasized customer control of data and the ability to change service vendors while keeping that data on the platform. Flexibility was a product feature with consequences for the customer’s bargaining position.

For an enterprise buyer, the purchase price is only part of the commitment. Connections have to be established, work has to continue, and a future change of supplier must somehow happen while everybody still has a day job. A platform organized around easier switching addresses that continuing relationship.

Seen beside MedHOK, the proposition gives Kottoor’s career a recognizable continuity. MedHOK brought functions together. FutureRx emphasized a framework in which customers could choose among connected services. The products and arrangements differed, but both businesses concerned themselves with how the parts fit. That is a reading of the career’s pattern, rather than a claim that every venture began with one grand plan.

“I’m taking what was broken and making it better with technology.”

Anil Kottoor · June 2024

Back to Tampa, back to the beginning

By June 2024, Kottoor was discussing another company, RevDoc, and a mobile application launching in Tampa and St. Petersburg. The customer relationship had moved closer to an individual user. The local launch gave his next business a defined place to begin.

His stated ambition followed a deliberate geographical order: establish the hometown operation first, then consider national and potentially international expansion. It was an aspiration expressed at that moment, rather than a timetable with guaranteed destinations. Even a repeat founder has to introduce a new product somewhere.

His description of the work was strikingly plain. He talked about using technology to improve something that was already broken. The phrasing brings the story back to the executive jobs, before investment announcements and ownership changes made it into a startup narrative. It puts the troublesome process at the beginning.

Kottoor’s career has accumulated titles: application development leader, CIO, president, CEO, founder. The more revealing progression runs through the work beneath them. He learned to run systems, built a company around connecting them, and returned to new businesses with different ways of arranging the relationships. For the moment, the recurring question is wonderfully practical: can this be made easier to use?