Company leader
Malinka Walaliyadde
Co-founder and CEO
AKASA
Malinka Walaliyadde is co-founder and chief executive of AKASA. AKASA builds generative AI that hospital billing teams use to read a chart and turn it into a claim.
Business
He founded the company with Ben Beadle-Ryby, Andy Atwal, and Varun Ganapathi. They started AKASA because, in his words, "while the quality of American medicine is among the best in the world, the healthcare system itself is overly complex and inefficient."
Billing staff are not trained as clinicians, and they have to read the chart to code the visit. AKASA fine-tunes open-source language models on clinical and financial records so a hospital's coders get a suggested code. Some hospitals recovered millions they would have missed when a code was wrong.