Cornerstone AI Taps Viraj Narayanan as Co-CEO to Drive Industry-wide Adoption of Clean Data in Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals

Amid growing regulatory pressure and oversight, Cornerstone AI provides life sciences an AI-based solution to cleaning data enabling faster and more cost-efficient drug development and commercialization

SAN FRANCISCO, April 4, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Cornerstone AI, makers of a powerful AI software solution that cleans real world healthcare data significantly faster and more accurately than existing solutions, today announced that Viraj Narayanan has joined the company as Co-CEO. Narayanan will work alongside Cornerstone AI founder and Co-CEO Michael Elashoff to scale its highly intelligent, automated software platform which has created unparalleled efficiencies while enabling confidence in the fidelity of data needed to answer critical scientific questions.

"We've built a remarkably robust platform to clean healthcare data at scale, without sacrificing the precision and accuracy required in life sciences," said Elashoff. "Now is the time that pharmaceutical companies need to access the insights in Real World Data. Greater pressure is coming to life science companies to operate efficiently, particularly as the government gets more involved in drug pricing. Companies have to automate, and they can't do it with messy, incomplete, or inaccurate datasets. Leveraging AI to create efficiencies and enable greater focus on science is a massive opportunity, which is why we added Viraj to the team. He will enable Cornerstone to focus on growth but also drive industry adoption of AI in ways that can make a fundamental difference to the development of innovative treatments and the overall cost of care."

Tackling the Clean Data Problem

The vast majority of data cleaning today is conducted by heavily manual processes, often involving highly trained technical individuals, that take time away from innovation and surfacing new treatment solutions. Such delays have the potential to not only drive up drug and care costs, but they also slow the ability to treat patients with lifesaving advances? all because companies can't get data clean enough to analyze. Cornerstone's self-learning AI assistant is designed specifically for this purpose, filling a significant gap in medical and drug R&D. Its first-of-its-kind platform includes automated data profiling, data cleaning and error detection features.

Narayanan experienced the problems associated with unclean data first-hand throughout his career, making Cornerstone's mission personal and relatable. Equipped with deep healthcare data, analytics, and services experience, Narayanan has become known for his ability to translate customer needs and buying preferences into products and solutions that provide scale and value. His particular expertise in business strategy, operational excellence, and organizational transformation is the perfect complement to Elashoff's product development and visionary focus.

Prior to joining Cornerstone, Narayanan served as Chief Commercial Officer for Ontada, a McKesson business (NASDAQ: MCK). Under his leadership, they developed first-in-class capabilities to leverage unstructured data and a common data model to create new, higher value recurring products, including the initial commercial sales.

Previously, Narayanan served as the General Manager and Senior Vice President of the life sciences business at COTA, an oncology real-world data and analytics company. He led the scaling of COTA's life sciences business from the ground up, bridging the gap between stakeholder needs, including the go-to-market strategy for the business unit. Under Narayanan's leadership, COTA's real-world data supported sponsors' regulatory submissions, including an FDA approval in 2021 while achieving double digit growth consistently over 4 years.

Earlier in his career, Narayanan served as a Principal with Decision Strategies International, a Heidrick & Struggles Company (NASDAQ: HSII), as well as a research analyst at Centocor and for the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on natural language processing. He is the author of several thought leadership articles on the role of data in clinical research. Narayanan holds a B.S. in Decision Science from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

Narayanan arrives at Cornerstone amid a period of strong growth, as early adopters realize significant gains from implementing its software. Cornerstone's Q4 2023 sales bookings represented over 1,600% growth relative to Q4 2022, including on-boarding of 2 major life science customers.

"Cornerstone will become the leading utility for data cleaning ," said Narayanan. "Everyone is learning how AI can help organizations run more efficiently than ever before, but in healthcare, nailing the data piece is essential. I've spoken with many customers who spend millions of dollars on consultants or who have to make difficult trade-offs because highly trained data scientists are being utilized to clean their data and prepare it for use. Cornerstone has a robust product that can do it 5x faster for a fraction of the cost so data scientists can move the needle for patient benefit. Imagine how the combination of speed, accuracy, and efficiency can transform how organizations leverage data. Now my focus is to operationalize this incredible product that Mike and the team have developed and continue to scale and extend so the broader healthcare industry can benefit."

To learn about the Cornerstone AI platform, please visit www.cornerstone.ai.

About Cornerstone AI

Founded by healthtech veterans, Cornerstone AI unlocks the power of clinical data through advanced software that quickly and accurately prepares data for analysis. Cornerstone's solution learns the structure and relationships for any dataset, creates models for every data point leveraging what was learned, uses the models to identify corrections for inconsistent data points, and intelligently fills in missing data and exports clean data with a complete audit trail. Find out more at ww.cornerstone.ai.

Media Contact

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SOURCE Cornerstone AI