Ajay Shrihari

Who they are

Ajay Shrihari is Founder and CEO of Coral Health — a IIITH-trained engineer who shut down Confido Health, rebuilt, and raised a $12.5M seed from Lightspeed and Z47 to automate healthcare's back office.

Person

Ajay studied Electrical Electronics and Communications Engineering at the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH), graduating in May 2021 — a program that fed directly into stints as an Undergraduate Researcher at both the Robotics Research Center at IIIT Hyderabad and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). From there he moved through early applied-AI roles: Deep Learning Researcher, internships at CropIn Technology (satellite imagery platform) and Polaris Wireless (GPS, GPRS, IoT), and a Founding Engineer and Founding Product Lead role at LimeChat, the social commerce platform. Before Coral, he also served as a Founding Advisor at at least one other venture. He founded Confido Health — named from the Latin for 'to trust' — which ultimately failed, making Coral his second attempt at building in healthcare AI. He started Coral in September 2024 with co-founder Aniket Mohanty and is now based in New York. The through-line is deep technical roots in robotics and computer vision, funneled into a persistent conviction that AI can fix how healthcare actually runs. He posts actively on LinkedIn about the operational absurdity of healthcare paperwork — 862-page faxes, prior authorizations, DME workflows — practical, problem-first content rather than founder inspiration.

Company

Coral raised a $12.5 million seed round in April 2026, led by Lightspeed and Z47, to scale its AI-powered healthcare administrative automation platform and expand its engineering team. The company automates prior authorizations, patient intake, fax processing, and follow-up communications for specialty healthcare providers, claiming 99.7% accuracy on back-office documents. Coral connects directly to existing EHR systems, fax lines, and payer portals — no infrastructure change required from providers. Within under a year of commercial operation it has reached multiple millions in annual revenue and is targeting 4x growth by end of 2026; notably, a portion of customers are paying full contract value upfront. The team is now building an AI workflow builder that lets providers design and deploy their own administrative workflows, plus a co-pilot layer to surface intelligence from the data being processed.

Market

Healthcare providers in the US face mounting administrative burdens — lost referrals, unprocessed faxes, labor shortages, and falling reimbursement rates — creating a clear demand for automation that general RPA tools haven't addressed due to the bespoke complexity of clinical workflows. Coral positions itself specifically in specialty care (DME/HME) and is going after a market alongside players like AcuityMD, which has raised $80 million and is valued near $1 billion and focuses on AI for medtech sales operations. The broader sector is drawing increased investment as of 2026, with Coral differentiating on deep integration with legacy infrastructure — including the fax machine — rather than requiring providers to change how they work.

Network

Coral was co-founded with Aniket Mohanty and is backed by Lightspeed India and Z47 as lead seed investors. The early team includes Alex Lindemann, Kyril Kotlovsky, and Kartikeya Tiwari. Jared Gaynes and Abha Bhakoo are also named as peers involved in the company's strategic alignment process.

Aniket Mohanty· Co-founder, Coral Health
Alex Lindemann· Team member, Coral Health
Kyril Kotlovsky· Team member, Coral Health
Kartikeya Tiwari· Team member, Coral Health
Jared Gaynes· Peer, Coral Health (strategic alignment)
Abha Bhakoo· Peer, Coral Health (strategic alignment)

How they likely show up

Founded Coral Health from scratch in September 2024 and closed a $12.5M seed by April 2026 → moves fast, compresses timelines, and treats speed as a competitive signal.
Previously founded Confido Health, which failed, before building Coral → has direct experience with the cost of a false start; likely pressure-tests assumptions earlier than most first-time founders.
Active LinkedIn poster on specific operational problems (862-page faxes, prior auth, DME workflows) → communicates through concrete problem-framing, not vision abstractions.
Short-stint tenure shape across early career (multiple internships, research roles, founding member positions) → comfortable with ambiguity and rapid context-switching; probably impatient with slow institutional cycles.
IIITH engineering background followed by deep learning research at IISc and the Robotics Research Center → defaults to first-principles technical reasoning, not just product intuition.
Targeting 4x revenue growth in a single calendar year → operates with aggressive internal benchmarks; likely expects the same output orientation from the people around him.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific LinkedIn post — the 862-page fax post is a good entry point — to show you've engaged with his actual framing of the problem, not just the press release.
→ Ask about the Confido Health experience before Coral — he's named it publicly and the contrast with Coral's early traction is worth exploring; it signals you're interested in the arc, not just the current win.
→ Talk in operational specifics: prior auth failure rates, fax volumes, DME workflow steps. He writes at that level of detail and will disengage if the conversation stays at the 'healthcare is broken' abstraction.
→ He's an engineer-founder; if you have a technical take on EHR integration or document accuracy, bring it — he'll engage more substantively than with market-size commentary.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the 862-page fax post — he wrote publicly about receiving a fax listing 27 patients and the operational insanity it represents; it's the clearest window into why he's building Coral and what gets him out of bed.
Bring up the Confido Health failure and Coral's fast traction — he shut down one healthcare company before founding Coral in September 2024 and reaching multiple millions in ARR within under a year; that's a specific arc worth acknowledging.
Reference the 'working with, not against, the fax machine' framing from Coral's April 2026 fundraise announcement — it captures his infrastructure-native approach and is a differentiated bet worth probing.

Discovery questions

Coral claims 99.7% accuracy on healthcare back-office documents — how did you get there technically, and where does it still break?
You founded Confido Health before Coral — what was the specific insight or failure from that experience that shaped how you designed Coral's go-to-market?
A portion of your customers are paying full contract value upfront, which is unusual in enterprise health-tech — what's driving that, and how does it change how you prioritize the roadmap?

Avoid

Don't pitch or discuss healthcare AI at the vision level — he writes entirely in operational specifics (fax processing, prior auth, DME intake) and will tune out quickly if the conversation stays abstract.

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