Kunal Sarda

Kunal Sarda spends his days thinking about the parts of healthcare no one puts on a brochure: caregiver scheduling, license renewals, onboarding forms, the reminders that pile up between a clinician and a patient. As co-founder and CEO of Arya Health, a New York company he started in 2022, he is trying to hand all of it to software.

Arya builds AI-powered digital agents aimed squarely at distributed care - home health, home care, and hospice. The agents integrate with the electronic medical records these agencies already use and take over administrative jobs that normally fall to overworked back-office staff: scheduling caregivers, checking compliance, running onboarding, chasing down expiring licenses. Sarda says the agents can cut administrative effort by 50 to 70 percent, and Arya prices them the way an agency thinks about labor - as capacity you can add for less than the cost of hiring.

The pitch landed. In late 2025 Arya announced an $18.2 million Series A led by ACME Capital, with participation from Ridge Ventures, Twelve Below, executives from OpenAI, and a set of post-acute care providers. The round brought the company's total funding to roughly $25 million. Sarda has described the raise as easy and fast, and said it was oversubscribed - not the usual language founders reach for. Revenue, by his account, grew sixfold over the course of the year.

A second act, not a first swing

Sarda is not new to building. More than a decade ago, while earning his MBA at The Wharton School, he co-founded VerbalizeIt with Ryan Frankel - a platform that connected travelers and businesses to live human translators over a phone, browser, or Skype. The company joined the Techstars 2012 class in Boulder and pitched on ABC's Shark Tank, walking away with a national audience and a spike in downloads.

VerbalizeIt kept expanding, from spoken conversation into documents, video, websites, and apps, until Smartling acquired it in December 2016. Sarda stayed on, focused on the product experience for both customers and translators, and eventually led customer engagement as a vice president. That stretch - years spent close to the people actually using the product - shows up in how he talks about Arya now.

Why home health

The market Sarda is chasing is large and unglamorous. He pegs U.S. distributed care at around $400 billion, with roughly $200 billion of that going to administrative payroll. It is exactly the kind of work that is easy to overlook and expensive to keep doing by hand. His argument is that the same wave of AI that everyone wants to point at flashy problems is better spent on the boring ones - the scheduling and compliance that quietly determine whether a caregiver ever reaches a patient.

He is also willing to make an outsized claim about where that leads. "The company that helps lead this change in healthcare becomes the most valuable technology company of our lifetime," he told AlleyWatch. Whether or not that holds, it tells you how he frames the stakes.

The name on the door

There is a personal detail underneath the corporate one. Arya is the name of Sarda's daughter, and he introduced her on LinkedIn as the company scaled. It is a small thing, but it lines up with the throughline across both of his companies: the products are always about getting technology out of the way so people can get back to each other. For a founder whose favorite fall stop is the Union Square Farmer's Market near Arya's old office, the human framing is not marketing. It is the whole point.

The near-term roadmap is concrete. Arya has been rolling out an Intake Agent to speed up patient onboarding and expanding the range of administrative functions its agents can handle, while hiring across product and customer success. The bet is steady rather than showy: pick the part of healthcare that everyone agrees is broken, automate it well, and let the results argue for the vision.