Shaju Puthussery and the paperwork that refused to disappear

Shaju Puthussery thought credentialing was taken care of. After a career inside dental insurance, it seemed a reasonable assumption. Then a payer CEO told him that bringing dentists into a network was still getting stuck in disorganized data. An apparently settled problem had acquired the bad manners to remain a problem.

He took it to Deepak Ramaswamy. A weekend conversation helped turn that complaint into a direction for LightSpun, the company they had begun building together. Puthussery has since described the discovery with an admission founders do not always put on the first slide: they backed into it. The customer had supplied a better starting point than the founders’ original map.

That makes a useful opening to his story. Puthussery brings more than twenty years of experience to insurance technology. Yet one of the consequential things he did with that experience was revise an assumption. Knowing the business got him close to the difficulty. Listening kept him from walking past it.

Physics, then the operating machinery

His academic training was in theoretical physics. He earned a master’s degree at Boston College, a detail that sits rather agreeably beside a career concerned with forms, files and business processes. The distance between those subjects is large enough to be interesting. His subsequent work, however, has been firmly inside organizations that need information to arrive correctly and produce something useful.

At P&R Technologies, he was a co-founder and chief technology officer. He went on to serve as chief information officer at P&R Dental Strategies, then chief analytics officer at DentaQuest. Technology, information, analytics: the titles describe different responsibilities around a familiar practical question. What can an organization do with the information it possesses?

The progression matters because administrative software crosses all those responsibilities. A record can be technically available and still difficult to use. A report can be accurate and arrive too late. An organization can own a great many systems while requiring its staff to carry information between them. Each department may have a sensible procedure; the combined procedure can still be a trial of endurance.

By 2019, Puthussery was chief operating officer at Overjet, working alongside a team that included Ramaswamy, its co-founder and CTO. He was involved in the commercial work of bringing AI software into insurance organizations. In a 2021 company announcement, he discussed the reach of its claims-processing technology. This was experience with adoption as well as invention: software had to find a place in an established business.

In 2022, he and Ramaswamy started the business that became LightSpun, initially called 32Health. Their working relationship already had a history. Puthussery became CEO; Ramaswamy became CTO. They returned to the administrative processes they knew, carrying both operating experience and the experience of building technology for the same industry.

The same record, again and again

The irritation behind LightSpun was repetition. Puthussery had watched old systems make small changes expensive, new benefit plans slow to introduce and paper claims dependent on manual entry. His objection was to the foundation underneath the work. The machinery demanded attention that the work itself should not have required.

“I knew the industry needed a better foundation.”

Shaju Puthussery, September 2025

Consider the provider record. Credentialing checks the professional information needed for participation in an insurance network. If that information is scattered, repeated or inconsistent, onboarding becomes a sequence of requests and verifications. A new screen does little for the employee who still has to visit another system, retrieve the evidence and enter the result.

The distinction helps explain the opening the founders found. Provider information has consequences further along the administrative chain. Getting it into useful shape can support work that follows, including claims administration. In that arrangement, credentialing belongs to the operating machinery of the business, connected to the records other processes depend on.

There is an ordinary human burden inside that chain. Re-entering a detail may take little time once. Re-entering it across offices, systems and counterparties gives a small task a surprisingly ambitious career. The person doing the work rarely gets to redesign the arrangement. A software company can at least attempt to change where the repetition begins.

LightSpun’s stated purpose is to bring core insurance operations onto one platform. Its products reach across provider records, benefits, claims, billing, customer support and reporting. That breadth reflects the founders’ view that the handoffs matter. A completed task is more useful when the next part of the business can use its result without starting over.

When a demonstration becomes a service

In November 2024, the American Dental Association’s Council on Dental Benefit Programs heard a demonstration from 32Health. The company showed its credentialing verification process, including the ability to check primary information and generate reports within minutes. The meeting record describes questions about operations and the platform. The subject had moved from a founder’s complaint into the detailed business of institutional adoption.

On March 28, 2025, the ADA announced its collaboration with LightSpun. The ADA Delegated Credentialing Service, powered by the company’s platform, integrates with CAQH’s provider data. It connects credentialing, data management and insurance application work. The association described an ambition to bring the process down to days, compared with the traditional wait of weeks to months.

For Puthussery, the collaboration provided a concrete expression of the company’s administrative thesis. An established association, an existing provider-data service and a software platform would work together. The point of the arrangement was the work it could carry. Its significance lies in connecting responsibilities that otherwise leave people managing the gaps.

He has also taken the subject into industry working groups. A 2025 conference program paired his explanation of LightSpun’s technology with discussion of the ADA’s role and CAQH’s contribution. It is a revealing setting for this kind of entrepreneurship. Progress includes explaining who does what, to people who will have to use the answer.

Capital for the unglamorous work

LightSpun announced a $13 million Series A in September 2025, led by Brewer Lane, with Virtue, Cambrian and Industry Ventures participating. Rohan Malhotra and Sean Doolan joined the board. The financing supported engineering and product expansion, customer onboarding and partnerships. Those are practical uses for capital in a company selling the ability to run another organization’s operations.

The company’s year-end account supplied a later snapshot. LightSpun reported supporting more than 175,000 providers and achieving certification across all eleven NCQA verification services. It also reported HITRUST certification. In this business, those milestones belong in the same conversation as product development: buyers have responsibilities that continue after a promising demonstration ends.

There is a business tension here. The founders want to reduce delay, while their customers need confidence in a replacement for familiar systems. Introducing a new tool adds work before it can remove work. Adoption has its own queue of questions. Reliability, evidence and a clear operating arrangement help a buyer decide whether the change is worth making.

Puthussery’s public professional interests have long included technology deployment, business strategy, operational effectiveness and team leadership. LightSpun brings those concerns together. The CEO has to connect the technical promise to an organizational decision, then help turn that decision into a working relationship. An elegant model has a busy calendar ahead of it.

The next question is still practical

By 2026, he and Ramaswamy were discussing the business in a succession of podcast conversations. They joined Jared S. Taylor in July, Kristian Marquez in August and Mark Costes for a Dentalpreneur appearance covered by LightSpun in September. The recurring subject was administrative infrastructure: how to build it, where delays begin and what changes when processes connect.

In a conversation recorded with Nathan Latka in September 2026, Puthussery described the progression from provider data management and credentialing toward the broader claims platform. He also discussed adapting development as AI tooling improved. The product ambition had remained recognizable while the tools available to build it changed. A young company had to keep learning how to make the thing it had set out to sell.

That brings the story back to his original correction. The overlooked problem was close enough to his experience to feel familiar, which made it easy to assume someone had dealt with it. The payer’s complaint interrupted that assumption. Years of knowledge became useful because he allowed a new piece of information to alter the plan.

His ambition now is to simplify the administrative experience across more of the business. It is an ambition best judged in ordinary units: fewer repeated requests, less waiting between systems, a usable record available when the next task begins. There is room for sophisticated technology behind those outcomes. The person trying to finish the work should not need to admire it first.

Puthussery has spent much of his career near the places where information becomes somebody else’s job. LightSpun is his attempt to improve that exchange. The paperwork has had a long run. He would like the people handling it to get on with their day.