Assistive AI company Suki has hired three new key executives to help the company grow its technical capabilities, clinical acumen and customer adoption.
Suki has hired former Uber executive Joe Chang as its chief technology officer (CTO). Kevin Wang, M.D., a hospitalist who held roles at tech-forward companies like apree health, has joined Suki as chief medical officer (CMO). Vikram Khanna was formerly president of customer success at Innovaccer, and he jumped aboard at Suki as its chief customer officer (CCO).
The three executives, announced Thursday, make for a total of six additions to the executive team in the last 12 months. Suki hired the head of enterprise sales at athenahealth as chief revenue officer, Datavant’s general counsel, and Block, Inc’s head of marketing.
Punit Soni, CEO of Suki, said the newly-formed executive leadership team will help Suki grow over the next three to five years to a company of a bigger size and scope.
“We have enterprise-level expansion contracts in hand, and there is a clear line of sight towards a significant triple-digit-million revenue business, and what it takes to actually run a business at that scale is talent that actually has been there and done that,” Soni explained.
When hiring Chang, Wang and Khanna, Soni said he looked for applicants that would be a good fit for Suki’s culture of transparency, data-driven decision-making and “absolute lack of politics.” Soni said he spends about eight hours in total interviewing each executive, including long walks and dinners with their families, to ensure chemistry.
Though Suki has stocked its arsenal with executive talent, Soni said the company will take a restrained approach through the end of the year to allow Chang, Wang and Khanna time to settle into their new roles and take stock of their departments. Restraint in the short term will allow for longer-term success, Soni said, and it doesn’t mean Suki won’t keep signing deals.
“It will still take a lot of work now, because all of these people will come in, they will organize, clean up, add the right leaders,” Soni said. “So you also want to make sure you grow at a little bit of a restrained way. It’s easy to throw a lot of money and keep scaling the team. It’s much harder to actually hold back, be a little frugal, and then get to a place to settle down. So we are going to be probably spending most of the rest of this year settling down and not necessarily just scaling.”
Chang was the former head of Uber Freight, the ride-share company’s commercial trucking business. Chang said the division ran like a startup within the company. Chang has also previously held roles at Google, Primer.ai and Marin Software.
While he hasn’t worked for a healthcare company before, Chang described how the technologies he oversaw in past roles translate to the healthcare space. “Machine learning techniques that we originally used to build models in predictive pricing have a lot of applicability in Suki,” Chang said. “Not everything that we solve is through an LLM, so applying the right-sized model for the task is important.”
Wang was the CMO of apree health, which oversees Castlight Health and Vera Whole Health. In addition to his medical background, he brings knowledge about revenue cycle management systems from his previous work.
“The biggest, most relevant part to Suki is that [apree] took the technology from the digital health company Castlight and tried to deliver that to provider groups across the U.S. to help them manage outcomes-based risk,” Wang explained. “Now at Suki, we get to go further upstream, literally into the patient-provider visit itself. And I think that’s a phenomenally honorable position. A lot of risk and reward comes from it, but I think that’s the only way to really drive change on behalf of providers.”
Khanna was most recently president of customer success at Innovaccer, another health AI platform company with an ambient scribe solution. Before Innovaccer, Khanna held leadership roles at Nutanix, Google, McKinsey and Intel. He also holds a Ph.D. in material science.
“As AI continues to become widely adopted and accepted in healthcare, the real differentiator for tech platforms will be how effectively it is used and adopted across the health system,” Khanna said in an email to Fierce Healthcare. “Through this role, I plan to work hand-in-hand with our partners to ensure that Suki’s customers not only adopt Suki but also understand and achieve measurable, lasting value from its technology. I do believe that the foundations Suki has laid and the success it has achieved will benefit greatly from my past experiences and mistakes.”
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