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Founder / Operator·RCM

Malinka Walaliyadde

CEO and Co-Founder at AKASA

South San Francisco, California

MW
Why they matter

A former a16z healthcare deal partner now running one of the few RCM AI vendors with a scaled Cleveland Clinic deployment, so reads both sides of the table.

Background

Malinka Walaliyadde is CEO and co-founder of AKASA, the healthcare AI company founded in 2018 as Alpha Health alongside Varun Ganapathi, Andy Atwal, and Ben Beadle-Ryby. Before founding the company, Walaliyadde was a deal partner at Andreessen Horowitz, joining in 2014 and helping build the firm's bio and healthcare investing practice across roughly 20 investments, with board-observer seats at Omada Health, PatientPing, and Apeel Sciences. Earlier roles include Counsyl, the healthcare practice at Deloitte, and Corning Life Sciences; a Cornell materials science graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 (Venture Capital, 2018), born in Sri Lanka.

Notable deals

  • 2018
    Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital as a deal partner at Andreessen Horowitz, working on the firm's $200M bio fund with 16 deals closed from seed to growth and board-observer roles at Omada Health, PatientPing, and Apeel Sciences
  • 2021
    Raised AKASA's $60M Series B led by BOND, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Costanoa Ventures, coinciding with the rebrand from Alpha Health to AKASA
  • 2025
    Signed a strategic collaboration with Cleveland Clinic to deploy generative AI coding tools across its U.S. locations, piloting against cases where coders review 100+ clinical documents and choose from 140,000+ codes
  • 2025
    Expanded the Cleveland Clinic partnership six months later to roll out AKASA's clinical documentation integrity solution across all U.S. locations, converting the coding pilot into a multi-product mid-cycle deployment

Call-prep brief

Background

  • Co-founder and CEO of AKASA (founded 2018 as Alpha Health, rebranded 2021), a generative-AI vendor for hospital revenue cycle operations.
  • Prior life as a deal partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2014, helping build the bio/healthcare practice: ~20 investments, board-observer seats at Omada Health, PatientPing, Apeel Sciences. Earlier at Counsyl, Deloitte's healthcare team, and Corning Life Sciences. Cornell materials science; Forbes 30 Under 30 (VC, 2018).

Current focus

  • Domain-tuned LLMs for the mid-revenue cycle: medical coding, clinical documentation integrity, prior authorization. Publicly claims AKASA's tuned models outperform general models like GPT-4 by 40-50% on their tasks, with models fine-tuned per institution.
  • Cleveland Clinic is the flagship reference: coding assistant announced April 2025, expanded to CDI across all U.S. locations by October 2025.

What they care about

  • Administrative complexity as the fixable failure of U.S. healthcare, not clinical quality: "the quality of American medicine is among the best in the world, the healthcare system itself is overly complex and inefficient."
  • Accuracy and recovered revenue as the proof metric (cites ~$1.5M recovered per $1B of net patient revenue), and augmenting an aging coder workforce rather than replacing it.

Recent moves

  • CDI Optimizer launch (May 2025); ranked #1 promising RCM startup by Black Book (June 2025); VP of Clinical Strategy hire (June 2026).

Potential sensitivities

  • Last funding round confirmed on AKASA's own newsroom is the 2021 Series B. Third-party aggregators report a ~$120M raise dated June 2024, but AKASA's press page shows a product launch on that date, not a financing. Treat the capital position as unverified and ask directly.
  • Competitive encroachment from EHR-native coding automation and incumbent RCM outsourcers.

Ask

  1. What is the durable wedge once Epic ships native coding automation at zero marginal cost?
  2. What did the Cleveland Clinic CDI expansion change in contracted ACV, deployment time, and reference-ability with other AMCs?
  3. What is the current capital position, and what would make a growth round or strategic partner attractive now?

Outreach draft

Subject
Quick call on AKASA's mid-cycle wedge
Malinka, I cover healthcare technology at [Firm], where we spend most of our time on revenue cycle and provider operations. The AKASA work with Cleveland Clinic stood out to us: going from a coding assistant to CDI across all U.S. sites inside six months is a hard proof point in a category crowded with pilots that never scale. I would value 30 minutes to hear how you frame the mid-cycle opportunity as EHR vendors move into coding automation, and where institution-tuned models hold an edge. Not a pitch. We back a small number of companies in this space and prefer to build the relationship well ahead of any process. Best, [Your Name]

Linked companies

Sources