Punit
Soni

The idea came from a dead end. Punit Singh Soni had already left Flipkart — India's answer to Amazon, where he'd served as Chief Product Officer — and was pitching healthcare startups on a familiar concept: a Slack-style communication layer for hospitals. Nurses told him, to his face, that they would not use another communication tool. He scrapped it. Then he started watching what doctors actually did all day.

They typed. Constantly. Into electronic health records that hadn't fundamentally changed their interface in twenty years. A clinician seeing twenty patients might spend three hours on documentation — capturing notes, codes, orders, summaries — after the last patient had left. The care was fine. The paperwork was crushing.

Soni's thesis — sharp and early — was that AI excels in domains with repeatable work, sophisticated users, and standardized language. Healthcare fit perfectly. In 2017, he founded Suki in Redwood City with that conviction and a phrase that would become something of a mantra: "AI is the new UI." Voice, not screens. Conversation, not forms.

He knew something about voice before most people were talking about it. At Motorola Mobility — which Google acquired in 2011 and where Soni held the VP of Product role — he oversaw the launch of the Moto X, one of the first consumer smartphones to feature an integrated, always-on voice assistant. He understood what it took for people to trust a machine with their words.

Then Flipkart happened. Walmart bought the Indian e-commerce giant, and Soni found himself running product for a company navigating explosive scale and intense competitive pressure. During the "Big Billion Days" sale — Flipkart's equivalent of Prime Day — a DDoS attack crashed the platform at midnight. Without waiting for executive consensus, Soni made the call: block all international traffic immediately, protect the India revenue stream. The site held. The decision stuck.

That pattern — fast call, clear conviction, no waiting for permission — runs through everything he's built at Suki.

Today, Suki's ambient clinical intelligence platform sits inside 350+ US health systems, including major networks like MedStar Health and Ascension Saint Thomas. Clinicians open a visit. Suki listens. It writes the note. It codes the encounter. It stages orders. It surfaces patient history. When the appointment ends, the documentation is done.

The company's own data shows clinicians complete notes 72% faster on average. Health systems report a 9X return on investment in the first year. In 2024 alone, Suki's client base quadrupled — the kind of growth that turns heads in Series D conversations, which it did: Hedosophia led a $70 million round in October 2024, with Venrock, March Capital, Flare Capital, and Breyer Capital participating. Zoom Ventures followed with a strategic investment in January 2025, linking Suki's ambient documentation to telehealth workflows.

Soni is blunt about what Suki is not: "We're not an AI scribing company." The positioning matters because the space is noisy. Nuance (Microsoft) and Abridge are formidable competitors. Dozens of smaller startups are chasing the same problem. His differentiation is platform breadth — Suki Assistant for clinicians, Suki Platform for health tech companies to embed Suki's voice AI into their own products, and a deepening partnership with Google Cloud's Vertex AI for clinical reasoning at scale.

The path from NIT Kurukshetra to a $255M-funded healthcare AI company is not a straight line. Soni grew up in India, studied electronics and communications engineering at one of the country's competitive NITs — where he was student body president and organized a national technology conference — then moved to the US for a master's in electrical engineering at the University of Wyoming. Wharton followed, with an MBA focused on venture capital. Then eight years at Google across product roles spanning News, Search, Books, Google+, and mobile applications.

He has written candidly about his bicultural identity: feeling like an outsider in Silicon Valley, then feeling like an outsider again when he moved to Bengaluru for Flipkart. The intensity of Indian tech culture surprised him after years in the Bay Area. The deliberateness of American corporate culture had surprised him before that. His advice to anyone navigating both worlds: "Spectacular failure and spectacular success are both better than mediocre middle of the road."

On what to look for when hiring: Soni tries to convince candidates not to join Suki. If they're still there after that conversation, they're the ones he wants. He calls them "fellow founders" — people willing to handle unglamorous work and genuinely invested in the mission, not just the resume line.

His vision for Suki is purposefully quiet. Not invisible as a company — Suki is very much a brand in its market — but invisible as a technology. A "quiet presence" that runs in the background of clinical work so seamlessly that clinicians stop thinking about it. When software works well enough that users forget it exists, that's when it becomes infrastructure. Infrastructure is what lasts.

Soni has said publicly he has no plans for a traditional exit. That's either a negotiating posture or a founding conviction — and given everything else about how he's built Suki, the evidence points to the latter.