
The former semiconductor marketer began with doctor discovery, moved into remote appointments, and ended up opening doors in five states. His useful lesson is simple: when software meets reality, follow the patient journey - even if it leads back to a room.
Faris Ghawi is the co-founder and CEO of Vytalize Health, a Hoboken-based value-based care company that partners with primary care physicians to manage Medicare patients through data, analytics, and financial incentives. A Lehigh-trained civil engineer who moved into healthcare consulting at EY and then earned an MBA at Columbia, Ghawi launched Vytalize in 2014 with college friends. Under his leadership the company grew to serve hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries across dozens of states, raised a $100M Series C in 2023, and topped Inc. Magazine's 2024 list as America's fastest-growing private company.
Chloe Harrouche is the co-founder and CEO of The Lanby, a New York membership practice that reimagines primary care as a hospitality-led, relationship-driven experience. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering graduate and former Deloitte healthcare strategy consultant, she built The Lanby around a simple bet: that primary care should feel less like a waiting room and more like a team that actually knows you. Members get a dedicated care trio - a lead physician, a wellness advisor, and a care manager - working from one coordinated plan.
Cody Simmons is the co-founder and CEO of DermaSensor, a Miami-based medical device company behind the first FDA-cleared, AI-powered handheld tool that helps primary care physicians evaluate skin lesions for cancer in seconds using elastic scattering spectroscopy. A bioengineer with a Brown degree, a Stanford master's and four years at Genentech, he took over the company in 2016 and spent nearly a decade shrinking a microwave-sized prototype into a point-and-click device, navigating FDA breakthrough designation, a De Novo clearance in early 2024, and a $16M Series B in 2025.
Rahul Rajkumar is the founder and CEO of Accompany Health, a Bethesda, Maryland company delivering home-based, technology-enabled primary, behavioral, and social care to low-income Americans with complex needs, especially dual-eligible Medicare-Medicaid patients. A Yale-trained physician and lawyer who holds an MD and a JD, he spent 15 years redesigning how the U.S. pays for and delivers care, from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to chief medical officer roles at CareFirst and Blue Cross North Carolina and COO of Optum Care Solutions. Accompany Health launched in January 2024 with $56 million in Series A funding led by Venrock, ARCH Venture Partners, and IVP.
Akili Hinson is the founder and CEO of Juno Medical, a technology-powered family medical practice he opened in Harlem in April 2020 with three patient rooms. A physician trained at Weill Cornell with an MBA from Columbia and a stint at McKinsey, he set out to build modern, family-centered primary care for what he calls 'the 99%' in neighborhoods that big health systems skip. Juno now runs clinics in Harlem, Brooklyn, East Atlanta, and Tulsa's Greenwood District, backed by a $12M Series A led by NEXT VENTURES and Serena Williams' Serena Ventures. He was named a 2024-2025 Obama Foundation USA Leader.
Alicia Hardy (Alicia Ferguson Hardy) is the CEO of CommuniCare+OLE, a federally qualified health center serving 70,000+ patients across Napa, Solano, and Yolo counties in California. A licensed clinical social worker turned executive, she rose through the ranks of OLE Health over more than a decade before becoming CEO in 2018, then engineered the landmark 2023 merger with CommuniCare Health Centers - a project she developed as her capstone during an Executive MBA at Yale School of Management. Named one of Yale SOM's 2023 Best & Brightest EMBA graduates, Hardy is a passionate advocate for health equity, multilingual care, and expanding access for underserved populations.
Cecilia Aviles, MBA, BSN, RN, is the Chief Executive Officer of LifeLong Medical Care, a Federally Qualified Health Center serving over 55,000 patients across Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the East Bay. A native San Franciscan who started her career as a trauma nurse, she brings more than 20 years of healthcare leadership experience — including 11 years at Sutter Health and earlier stints at Kaiser Permanente, UCSF, KPMG, and McKesson — to lead one of the Bay Area's most vital safety-net providers. A Carol Emmott Fellow and recognized among the Bay Area's top Hispanic nurses, she is committed to making healthcare accessible, equitable, and affordable for underserved communities.

Marty Lynch, PhD, MPA, is CEO Emeritus of LifeLong Medical Care, the Berkeley-based federally qualified health center he led for nearly four decades. He grew a small Over 60 Health Center into a 16-clinic network covering Alameda, Contra Costa, and Marin counties, and now lectures at UC Berkeley while serving on California's Master Plan for Aging Advisory Committee.

Kerem Ozkay is the CEO of Carbon Health, the modern primary and urgent care chain. An aerospace engineer turned marketer turned operator, he ran growth and operations at Carbon for years before founder Eren Bali handed him the top job in August 2024. He now steers the company through a Chapter 11 restructuring designed to refocus on its hybrid care model and homegrown EHR.
Steven Sell is a healthcare operator who spent five years as CEO of agilon health, the Westerville, Ohio company that backs independent primary care physicians taking full risk on Medicare patients. He stepped down on August 4, 2025. Before agilon, he ran Health Net, a $14 billion business with three million members.
Sean Mehra is the co-founder and CEO of HealthTap, a Sunnyvale-based virtual-first primary and urgent care platform serving millions of Americans across all 50 states. A Yale biomedical engineering graduate and Stanford MBA, Mehra pivoted from aspiring physician to serial tech entrepreneur—building games companies with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players before co-founding HealthTap during his first year at Stanford business school. Under his leadership as CEO (appointed June 2021), HealthTap has grown to serve over 350 million consumers, partnered with Samsung Health to embed virtual care in millions of Android devices, and launched Dr.A.I., an LLM-powered pre-visit interview system. Mehra also co-founded what is now Yale's TSAI City entrepreneurship incubator.
Adam Farren is the CEO of Canvas Medical, a San Francisco-based programmable EMR platform accelerating everyday medicine through AI-powered clinical workflows. With nearly two decades of experience scaling venture-backed companies across healthcare, fintech, media, and education, Farren rose from teacher and high school basketball coach to one of healthcare tech's most active growth operators. He spent eight combined years as Chief Growth Officer at Elation Health and Osmind before joining Canvas as President and COO in April 2023, then ascending to CEO in September 2024. Under his leadership, Canvas launched Hyperscribe - an open-source AI clinical copilot - and the Backplane platform for AI agent deployment, betting that the agentic future of medicine runs on open, programmable infrastructure.
Vasiliki 'Vicky' Demas, PhD, is the CEO and founder of identifeye HEALTH, an AI-enabled retinal imaging company that brings specialized eye screening to primary care settings. A chemical engineer by training with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, she cut her teeth as a founding member of Google Life Sciences (which became Verily) and helped build foundational technology for GRAIL's Galleri multi-cancer early detection test. At identifeye HEALTH — which she joined in 2021 and rebranded from Tesseract Health — she leads a 38-person team developing a portable, FDA-registered AI retinal camera that lets minimally trained staff detect diabetic retinopathy and systemic disease markers in the same visit patients already make to their primary care doctor.
Dr. Shubhra Jain, MD, MBA is Chief Business Officer at Hippocratic AI, the $3.5B generative AI healthcare company building the world's safest patient-facing AI agents. A rare triple threat - trained primary care physician, Stanford engineer (MS Biodesign), and Wharton MBA - she brings a decade of healthcare investing and product leadership to Hippocratic AI's commercial strategy. Before joining HAI, she led healthcare investing at Tarsadia Investments and Cota Capital, and held product leadership roles at Natera and Pieces Technologies. A first-generation immigrant from a small Indian town, she is a passionate advocate for health equity, underrepresented founders, and making healthcare abundant for all.

Samantha Walter is a Healthcare Partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she helps portfolio companies grow by building strategic partnerships across the care delivery ecosystem - payors, providers, employers, and retail. A University of Wisconsin-Madison finance graduate originally from Minneapolis, she brings deep operational credibility to the VC world: before joining a16z, she built a Direct Contracting Entity at Carelon (then CareMore/Aspire under Anthem/Elevance) in 2020, drove customer success at Quartet Health, and cut her teeth as a healthcare revenue cycle consultant at Huron Consulting Group in New York City. She lives and works in NYC, bridging Silicon Valley capital with real-world healthcare infrastructure.