July 14th, 2023
IITKGP Alums Kanav Hasija and Abhinav Shasank founded Unicorn Innovaccer currently valued at $3.2 billion
IITKGP Foundation
Innovaccer’s journey started in 2011 when co-founders and 2010 IITKGP B.Tech alumni, Abhinav Shashank and Kanav Hasija began a data analytics project at Wharton and Harvard University. This project focused on bringing distributed datasets together and applying analytical technologies to that data. In 2014, using this seed of an idea, Abhinav and Kanav were joined by Sandeep Gupta and established their startup, Innovaccer. Innovaccer combines data into a single patient record and platform, allowing healthcare professionals to obtain a 360-degree view of their patients. As a result, Innovaccer improves the quality of patient care while simultaneously driving down unnecessary costs.
According to Entrepreneur.com (India), Hasija met Abhinav Shashank during their college days at IIT Kharagpur. After graduating, Hasija went abroad to the US to study patent law while Shashank worked in the automation space in India. However, the longing to innovate would bring them back together. Hasija returned to India in 2012, reconnected with Shashank, and met Sandeep Gupta, an IIM Ahmedabad alumni. After recognizing that the cost of digital storage for data was going down without significant advancement in data management technology, the three men saw an opportunity. So, Shashank, Hasija, and Gupta developed a cloud layer that connects with a number of existing electronic health record systems. This data activation platform “...unifies patient data between disparate EHRs (electronic health records) and across care settings to give providers access to the tools they need at the point of care.”
This year, Innovaccer, focusing on value-based healthcare, has unveiled a conversational AI assistant, Sara (named aptly after the Hindu Goddess of Knowledge, Saraswati). Sara generates complex analytic insights about population health data via humanlike responses. Its goal is to put enterprise healthcare analytics into the hands of care teams. Providers can ask Sara complex questions about their health system’s population and get immediate answers on various metrics.
Reflecting upon his IITKGP journey from student to entrepreneur, Kanav told us the following, “IITKGP pushed me towards research, agility, and depth. Within my four years at IITKGP, I moved from building real life use-cases with piezoelectric material to learning about patents and their valuations to mastering data management skills. Finally, it led me to have [a] solid foundation of building a data platform enterprise which is helping to save lives, reduce healthcare costs, and improve the quality of care for millions.”