Shashi Shankar

The overlap is the kind of thing that sounds obvious once someone says it and impossible until someone builds it. American health data is scattered by design - every hospital, every clinic, every specialist keeps its own slice, and the slices rarely talk. A patient who has seen ten providers has ten partial stories and no narrator. Shankar's wager is that the narrator should be the patient, not the institution.

That conviction has a date attached to it. The 21st Century Cures Act gives every American the legal right to their own medical records. Most people read that and shrug. Shankar read it and saw infrastructure. If the law already says the data belongs to the patient, then the unified record everyone wants is not a permission problem - it is an assembly problem. Novellia is the assembly line.

The mechanics are deliberately unglamorous. A new user signs up in about ninety seconds, authorizes access, and Novellia pulls records from major hospital systems and clinics in real time. Lab results, medication histories, clinical notes - the scattered slices arrive and get stitched into one continuously updated profile. Proprietary AI does the messy work of turning inconsistent records into a clean chronological narrative that is, as the company likes to say, structured from the start.

For the patient, that is a free way to finally own your own history. For a biopharma researcher, a million of those clean narratives is something close to a superpower - treatment gaps, early risk signals, and patterns that conventional data sources miss. Shankar is careful about the order of operations. The patient comes first not as a slogan but as a constraint: "The only way to build that unified record is to work directly with patients."

It is working well enough that the people who fund this kind of thing have noticed. Novellia announced an $18 million Series A led by Spark Capital, with four other funds along for the round and total funding reported at $28 million. The company has roughly thirty employees in New York and a roster of awards that arrived faster than most startups earn a logo: Best Electronic Health Record Service at the 2025 MedTech Breakthrough Awards, a spot on Digital Health New York's "10 Startups to Watch," and a place for Shankar on Worth Magazine's 2025 AI & Health Access Pioneer list.

Shankar is allergic to the usual AI sermon. His advice to founders is almost rude in its bluntness: "Don't start with AI - start with the problem." At Novellia the problem came first, by years, and it came with a name.

What separates the company from the long graveyard of "patient data" startups is the refusal to treat patients as a means to an end. The free consumer app is not a customer-acquisition trick that gets quietly deprecated once the enterprise contracts land. It is the supply chain. Without patients choosing to consolidate their records and choosing to share, there is no longitudinal dataset for anyone to buy. Shankar designed the incentives so the two sides of the business cannot be pulled apart, which is also why he can say "trust isn't optional" and mean it as an engineering spec rather than a press line.

When Shankar's grandfather - he calls him Tata - was diagnosed with gastroesophageal cancer, the family did what families do: they ran. Specialist to specialist, scan to scan, against a clock nobody could see. Four months later he was gone. What stayed with Shankar was not only the loss but the absurdity around it. Across all those providers and all those months, no single complete picture of the man's medical history ever existed. The people trying to save him were each working from a fragment.

By then Shankar had spent nearly a decade at Genentech and Roche, long enough to know that the fragmentation was not a glitch. It was the steady-state of the entire system. He had watched data sit in silos that never resolved into a story. The professional frustration and the personal grief met at the same conclusion: someone had to build the record from the patient up, because no institution was incentivized to.

So he did. He co-founded Novellia with Elliot Katz, its CTO, and built a company whose first principle is consent. Patients choose, every time, whether their anonymized data joins a specific research initiative. Shankar refuses to treat that as a compliance checkbox. "Trust isn't optional - it's the foundation," he says, and the platform is architected so the patient holds the keys, not the other way around.

The mission statement reads like a vow more than a tagline: to help every person reclaim ownership of their health, one medical record at a time. It is the kind of line that would sound saccharine from anyone who had not sat in that waiting room.

Shankar was born in Texas to Indian immigrant parents and grew up nomadic - Texas, India, Massachusetts, eventually a coastal Massachusetts town. The household ran on a particular blend of unconditional love and zero excuses. His father kept a whiteboard in the dining room and quizzed him on math and chemistry during meals, which is either charming or terrifying depending on how much you liked chemistry.

He credits his parents as his "unofficial Board of Directors" and still calls them daily. His older brother was the early role model. If you want to know where a founder's tolerance for discomfort comes from, it is usually a story like this one - perseverance treated as table manners.

The other formative scene is more cinematic. Shankar met an early backer he refers to as Ernesto at, of all places, a whiskey-tasting networking event. The chance conversation turned into mentorship and the introductions that move a company from idea to round. It is a useful reminder that capital, like medical records, often lives in the wrong place until someone goes and finds it.

Shankar talks about AI the way a carpenter talks about a saw - useful, sharp, beside the point if you do not know what you are building. The thing he is building is a world where the longitudinal story of a human life is not trapped in the institution that happened to see it last. Project EVEREST is the clearest preview: a breast cancer initiative that pulled Daiichi Sankyo, Genentech and AstraZeneca onto the same data effort, which is the kind of coalition that usually requires a regulator or a crisis to assemble.

The aspiration he names is bigger than any single disease. It is that scattered records never again stand between a person and the care they deserve, and that the data people choose to share flows back into research that helps the patients who come after them. That is a long game, and Shankar seems to know it. His favorite piece of personal advice doubles as a founder's survival kit: "Don't allow the force of your convictions to rob you of the joy of your journey." For someone who turned a grandfather's death into a company, the line lands less like a motivational poster and more like a discipline he has to practice.

He has the credentials to be insufferable about all of it and somehow is not. Dartmouth, a stint of executive education at INSEAD, a decade inside two of the most respected names in biopharma, a Series A from Spark, a Worth Magazine ribbon. The through-line is not the resume. It is the whiteboard in the dining room, the daily calls to the unofficial Board of Directors, the chance mentor met over whiskey. Shankar built a company about making sure no one's story gets lost, and he tells his own like a man who has been paying attention to the details that prove the point.