Founders Everywhere: Vish Srivastava and Sanjay Hariharan
Vish Srivastava and Sanjay Hariharan are the co-founders of Century Health, a platform that accelerates drug development and commercialization by applying AI to real-world data.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
New treatments can be life-changing for patients and their loved-ones who share in the journey. Century Health is accelerating drug development and commercialization by applying AI to real-world data previously untapped by biopharma. They work directly with researchers who have often collected data on specific diseases for years. Their main customers are pharmaceutical companies seeking real-world evidence for their recently approved drugs. Century Health does the heavy lifting to rapidly get needed insights, all while supporting the research community and protecting patient privacy.
Co-founders Vish Srivastava, CEO, and Sanjay Hariharan, CTO, both have backgrounds in life sciences technology. Vish was a product leader in healthtech startups and Sanjay has worked for a decade in healthcare analytics as a statistician, applied data scientist and machine learning engineer. They built Century Health to accelerate access to breakthrough treatments, with the power of AI.
What motivated you to build Century Health?
Vish: Through working at Evidation Health I learned the importance of rich, longitudinal clinical data for biopharma companies. This experience coincided with a personal journey with my grandfather's battle with Alzheimer's disease. Witnessing his decline, coupled with my professional insights, sparked the idea of leveraging comprehensive clinical data to understand diseases better and to aid in the access to effective treatments.
Sanjay: I've always been passionate about data and mathematics, and how we can use them to drive value. During my time at McKinsey, two things stood out to me. First, I did a lot of work with claims-based data, but I found that our clients wanted more clinical information and patient-level medical information. Second, I realized that we were often repeating the same analyses, and there was an opportunity to package our expertise into software for scalability and increased impact.
What is Century Health's North Star?
Our mission is accelerating access to breakthrough treatments with the power of AI.
Tell us about some recent milestones that Century Health crushed?
We’re emerging from stealth to announce our oversubscribed $2M pre-seed round. We’re also excited to be working with researchers at the University of California San Diego and Yale.
What sets Century Health apart?
Once a drug is approved, pharma companies are on the clock to get it into the hands of patients. While others rely heavily on human-driven analysis, we leverage AI to provide rapid insights from robust clinical datasets. Our LLM-powered analysis tool provides answers in minutes, as opposed to weeks, which makes a world of difference when time is of the essence for our customers.
What’s one of your greatest professional accomplishments?
Vish: I developed a jobs platform aimed at empowering underserved youth in northern India. Collaborating with a nonprofit and securing funding from organizations like the Ford Foundation, we built the platform from the ground up and ultimately reached over 20,000 users. It was deeply meaningful work and I’m proud of the team that continues the good work.
Sanjay: I collaborated on a model for predicting sepsis, a severe infection in hospitals. Our work was published in a top machine learning journal, ICML, and I had the opportunity to present it in Australia. The algorithm we developed was implemented in the Duke Medical Center and is now used routinely in the ICU. This experience highlighted the immense potential of AI and ML in both academic research and practical healthcare applications, underscoring the profound impact these technologies can have in saving lives.
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