healthcare-finance
(8)Aahuti Patel and the quiet arithmetic behind a $94 billion company
Aahuti Patel works where forecasts become choices: inside the North American finance operation of Johnson & Johnson. Her sparse public profile reveals a career built around scale, judgment and the unglamorous discipline of making numbers useful.
John Clendening
John Clendening is the founder and CEO of Earned (Earned Wealth), a tech-enabled financial services firm built exclusively for doctors, dentists, and their medical practices. After more than two decades running large financial businesses, including a stint as CEO of Blucora and senior leadership at Charles Schwab where he ran Schwab Bank, he started Earned to fold wealth management, tax, accounting, insurance, and practice services into a single platform for healthcare professionals. The company has raised roughly $225 million and grown past 240 employees, and it landed on Newsweek and Forbes advisory-firm rankings in 2025.
Karl Kipke
Karl Kipke is the founder and CEO of HealthGrowth Pharmacy Solutions, an Austin, Texas company that gives independent and community pharmacies a single ecosystem of lending, advisory, group purchasing, and transition services. A former Wall Street banker who spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns before turning to venture investing, Kipke built HealthGrowth Capital into a direct lender for pharmacies and closed a $16.8 million debt-and-equity financing package in April 2020 to expand its reach to independent pharmacy owners across the United States.
Jack O'Hara
Jack O'Hara is the co-founder and CEO of Translucent, an AI-native financial operating system for healthcare. After eight years running technology and transformation inside multi-billion-dollar provider organizations - including a stint as CIO at value-based care group ChenMed and CIO/Chief Transformation Officer at Springfield Clinic - he started Translucent in 2024 to give every hospital and medical group its own always-on AI financial analyst. The company pairs operational, clinical, and financial data into a single view that surfaces real-time insight and root-cause analysis. Translucent raised a $7M seed in August 2025 and a $27M Series A led by GV in March 2026.
Dilpreet Sahota
Dilpreet Sahota is the co-founder and CEO of Trek Health, a San Mateo-based, AI-powered platform that turns the federal price-transparency data dump into a weapon healthcare providers can use to benchmark and negotiate their payer contracts. Founded in January 2022, Trek Health landed its first paying customer two months later, crossed 100 customers by late 2024, and raised an $11M Series A led by Madrona in 2025. A Stanford and UC Berkeley graduate who cut his teeth at Health IQ and Big Health, Sahota built Trek to attack a quietly brutal problem: identical medical services can be reimbursed at rates that vary 300-500%, and the smaller players almost never know it.
Jedrzej Litwiniuk
Jedrzej (Jed) Litwiniuk is the co-founder and CEO of Auxilius Pharma, a Boston- and New York-based pharmaceutical company built on the idea that the next breakthrough heart drug might already exist - it just needs to be reformulated. A corporate-finance and investment hand who crossed from PZU and LUX MED deal tables into the lab, he is steering AUX-001, a once-daily reformulation of nicorandil aimed at becoming the first new oral therapy for chronic stable angina in the US since 2006. In December 2025 the company closed a $4 million Series A to push the candidate through pharmaceutical optimization and a Phase Ib trial.
Michelle Larivee
Michelle Larivee is the co-founder and CEO of WTHN, the New York wellness company turning acupuncture from a months-long waitlist into a walk-in ritual. A Georgetown and Wharton graduate who spent 13 years in healthcare finance - Merrill Lynch, the World Bank's IFC, Deloitte, and a secondment to the World Economic Forum - she traded debt financings for needles after Traditional Chinese Medicine resolved pain that Western medicine could not. Since 2018 she has built WTHN into a chain of New York studios, an e-commerce line of acupressure tools and herbs stocked in 200+ retailers including Ulta, and a brand backed by a $5M Series A led by L Catterton.
Felix Steinmeyer
Felix Steinmeyer is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cherry, the leading buy-now-pay-later platform built specifically for healthcare and wellness providers. A Stanford MBA with dual master's degrees, he previously co-founded and sold Mason Finance before turning his attention to the underserved gap between patients who need care and their ability to pay for it. Under his leadership, Cherry has grown to serve 60,000+ providers, raised a Series B of $44M in 2022, and in April 2025 achieved a valuation exceeding $2 billion with a Series C round - making it one of the most significant vertical BNPL players in healthcare.