nference partners with medical centers to turn decades of rich and predominantly unstructured data captured in EMRs into powerful solutions that enable scientists to discover and develop the next-generation of personalized diagnostics and treatments for patients worldwide.

nference | About Us

Murali Aravamudan is a serial entrepreneur, inventor and engineer who has built, led and exited several successful media and telecom technology companies prior to founding nference in 2013. In addition to serving as CEO of nference, he is also CEO of Anumana, a new company from nference and Mayo Clinic. In 2005, Mr. Aravamudan co-founded and served as chief executive officer of Veveo, a software company that enabled quick, efficient content discovery in input-constrained devices, including televisions and mobile phones. As CEO of Veveo, he established the company’s leadership in its target market segments with more than 100 million device deployments, as well as its innovation of conversational interfaces. His leadership translated into an expanding patent portfolio for Veveo with 95 granted US patents and 70+ pending applications. He helped raise $28M in equity in two rounds from Matrix Partners, Norwest Ventures and Northbridge Ventures. Veveo was acquired by TiVo (formerly Rovi) in 2014 for over $75M. Mr. Aravamudan founded Winphoria Networks in 2000 and served as chief technology officer until its acquisition by Motorola in 2003 for $200M. Mr. Aravamudan then served as vice president and general manager of the Winphoria division of Motorola’s Global Telecom Solutions Sector. Winphoria pioneered development of the mobile wireless softswitch and instant communications applications for mobile networks. At Winphoria he helped raise $54M in equity in two rounds from Matrix Partners, Norwest Ventures and Northbridge Ventures. Earlier in his career, Mr. Aravamudan served as vice president and chief technology officer of the communications software business at Lucent Technologies and as department head of communications software research at Bell Laboratories. He was a principal involved in the creation of softswitch, the revolutionary technology for IP-based telephone networks that is today the foundation for next-generation converged voice and data networks. Mr. Aravamudan has authored 127 US patents and has more than 100 patents pending in the areas of search, personalization, conversational interfaces, machine learning/AI systems, data networking, telephony and, recently, computational biology. He holds a master’s degree in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science.

Venky Soundararajan, PhD is an entrepreneur, scientist and inventor. As the chief evangelist for nference, Dr. Soundararajan has been instrumental in building the long-term strategic partnership with the Mayo Clinic, by enabling the automated de-identification of EHRs to protect patient privacy and their machine-augmented curation to unlock real-time biomedical insights. By harnessing this distinctive platform, Dr. Soundararajan has led multi- year R&D data-science collaborations with some of the world’s largest enterprises. These collaborations have spanned a broad spectrum of clinico-genomic applications, ranging from the discovery of novel medicine and diagnostic solutions, to the quantification of real-world epidemiological outcomes such as the impact of mass vaccination on pandemics. Dr. Soundararajan’s scientific research on the COVID-19 pandemic has led to multiple breakthroughs that have shaped public health policy. Some of these salient contributions include decoding the earliest signals of COVID-19 onset, identifying the reservoirs of SARS- CoV-2 infectivity at single cell resolution, genomic epidemiology for pinpointing the emergence of variants of concern, and publishing the world’s first real-world studies validating the effectiveness, safety, and durability of the COVID-19 vaccines. Beyond pandemic preparedness, Dr. Soundararajan’s research has resulted in the identification of multiple tumor-specific antigens and decoding the earliest signals for detecting chronic diseases like pulmonary hypertension from raw ECG waveforms. His ultimate mission is to teach machines how to read and comprehend all forms of biological data and clinical knowledge, towards the vision of transforming healthcare to benefit every patient and care provider in our world. Dr. Soundararajan has authored over 50 scientific papers and patents. His scientific findings have been covered widely by mainstream media and cited by multiple public health agencies, regulatory bodies, and governments. Dr. Soundararajan completed his Fellowship in Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and received his PhD from MIT in Biological Engineering and his Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).

nference was founded by Murali Aravamudan, CEO, and Venky Soundararajan, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer.

Ajit Rajasekharan is an accomplished machine-learning practitioner with broad experience in technological innovation. He is a regular contributor to the Medium publication Toward Data Science and the data science community at Quora on the topics of natural language processing and machine learning. Prior to joining nference, he was vice president of engineering at Rovi, the company that acquired Veveo, which was subsequently acquired by TiVo.  Mr. Rajasekharan, a co-founder of Veveo, also co-founded Readia, an innovator in digital education. Prior to Readia he was an engineer at Audible, where he participated in building the world’s first digital audio player and secure digital content delivery system.  Mr. Rajasekharan holds more than 60 U.S. patents. He earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in Physics from Madras Christian College and the other in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Science.

David McMullin has more than two decades of experience in corporate development, strategic planning, commercialization and operations across multiple sectors in the life sciences industry. 
In addition to serving as chief business officer of Anumana, he continues in his role of chief strategy officer of nference. 
Prior to joining nference and Anumana, Mr. McMullin served as chief business officer of Aldeyra Therapeutics, a Nasdaq listed biotechnology company. Before Aldeyra, Mr. McMullin ran U.S. Internal Medicine at Shire plc, a $1.4 billion rare disease and specialty pharmaceutical company, and was previously the head of Global Commercial Operations at Shire. 
Prior to his work at Shire, he was the vice president of Global Supply Chain Management and Strategy at Novartis. He holds an MBA with high distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Brigham Young University.

Prior to joining nference labs (Bangalore, India) as the VP of Engineering, Vishy was the Head of Engineering at Blackbuck where he worked on India’s fastest growing online freight MarketPlace. He’s also serves as a Member of the Board of Trustees at the eVidyaloka Trust, a not for profit organization in Bangalore that aims at transforming the educational landscape of rural India. Vishy also worked at Veveo.net, which was later acquired by Rovi(TiVO) and Winphoria Networks (acquired by Motorola).

Kyle oversees nference's global legal affairs, bringing to the company more than 25 years of experience in managing corporate legal operations and compliance functions as well as implementing complex life sciences and other strategic collaborations. Prior to nference, Kyle was Senior Vice President and General Counsel of iboss, a global cybersecurity firm, and previously served as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Decision Resources Group (DRG), a global provider of best-in-class healthcare data, analytics and insights products and services. Prior to DRG, Kyle was Senior Vice President and General Counsel for The Princeton Review, Inc., a college admissions and test preparation company. 

Earlier in his career, he served as Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Sapient Corporation, a global integrated marketing and technology services company, and Director of Legal Affairs and M&A Integration for ZEFER, a technology implementation and consulting services firm. He began his career as an associate in the health law department of Ropes & Gray, a global law firm. Kyle holds a B.A. with Distinction from the University of Michigan and a Juris Doctor degree, magna cum laude, from Boston College Law School.

Tom has over 30 years of experience serving in a wide variety of financial roles. He has been the Chief Financial Officer of four organizations and spent the last 14 years in life sciences, serving as CFO of Harvard Bioscience, Inc. and Biostage, Inc. Previously, he was CFO of Tivoli Audio, a venture capital-backed start-up, and of Cabot Supermetals, a $350 million Cabot Corporation division. he spent eight years practicing as a Certified Public Accountant at Deloitte & Touche after earning a BS in Finance and Accounting at Babson College.

Mike Koenig oversees the nference strategic partnership commercial and operational teams responsible for supporting the company’s exclusive collaborations with academic medical centers and health systems, including Mayo Clinic.  Most recently, he served as a partner and portfolio manager at NTTVC, a $500 million independent venture firm formed in partnership with NTT. Previously, Mr. Koenig was the Global Head of Business Development and Customer Success at TiVo prior to its acquisition by Rovi. Before TiVo, he served as CCO at Veveo, where he managed sales, business development and services, and led its acquisition by Rovi.  Earlier in his career, Mr. Koenig served as vice president of Product Management, Sales and Professional Services at Motorola and Winphoria Networks, and in other leadership positions at Lucent Technologies and AT&T. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Arizona State University. 

Dr. Rakesh Barve is vice president of data science and engineering at Anumana and serves in the same role at nference, where he has been for almost three years. At nference, Dr. Barve is building the first large-scale, AI-based inference and decision-enabling pharmacological and clinical data platform to enable intelligent and effective clinical care solutions and drug development. He is leading engineering and product teams using AI, statistics and computer science techniques to synthesize scientifically sound knowledge from vast heterogenous volumes of biomedical and clinical healthcare data. Prior to joining nference, Dr. Barve his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, followed by a PhD in Computer Science from Duke University.

Sankar Ardhanari enjoys building software to help solve life science problems at nference. Prior to joining nference he was leading efforts in automated information extraction and image processing in TiVo. At Veveo, which was acquired by Rovi(TiVo), he built personalized search and conversation interfaces across mobile, set-top-box and web platforms. Previously at Winphoria, acquired by Motorola, and Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies he engineered fault-tolerant networking and telecommunication systems.

Trisha Ellis is a highly accomplished human resources professional with proven record of leading strategic HR functions for Global Technology organizations. In previous roles, Trisha has helped to execute successful talent management and HR Services delivery as well as act as a strong partner, advisor and key influencer to senior executive leaders (SVPs, Division Presidents, CIO). Prior to joining nference, Trisha worked at Virtustream as Chief Human Resources Officer and Dell as Vice President of Human Resources and Global Services.

nference’s senior leadership team boasts of experts spanning the technology, life sciences and data sectors.

To date nference has raised more than $150M capital from Matrix Capital Management, Matrix Partners, Mayo Clinic Ventures and NTTVC.

One Main Street, Suite 400 East Arcade, 4th Floor Cambridge, MA 02142

2nd Floor, Indiqube Golf View Homes, 3rd Cross Road, S R Layout Wind Tunnnel Road, Murugesh Palaya Bengaluru 560017

18 3rd Street S.W. Suite #201 Rochester, MN 55902

Powering quantum leaps in human health

Founders

Murali Aravamudan

Venky Soundararajan, PhD

Leadership Team

Ajit Rajasekharan

David McMullin

Vishy Thiagarajan

Kyle Bettigole

Tom McNaughton

Mike Koenig

Prasanth Perugapalli

Rakesh Barve

Sankar Ardhanari

Trisha Ellis

Board and investors

Murali Aravamudan

David Goel

John Halamka

Offices

Cambridge, MA (Headquarters)

Bangalore

Toronto

Rochester