Company leader
Pranay Kapadia
Co-founder and CEO
Notable
Pranay Kapadia is co-founder and chief executive of Notable, whose AI assistants schedule visits, check insurance, send referrals, and close gaps in care for health systems. He came to healthcare as an outsider from mortgage software, after his wife, a psychiatrist, said she felt like "the highest paid data collector in the world."
A Computer from His Mother's Job
He grew up in Mumbai, India, where his mother had access to a Sinclair ZX80 through her job as a tutor. The machine plugged into a black-and-white television and loaded its software from cassette tapes, and to a 7-year-old it seemed like magic. "I absolutely fell in love with the notion of being able to dream up something and then put it into action," he said. "It was like having this superpower."
Free Pizza and a Job at Intuit
After a computer science degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he stayed for an MBA. At a lunch Intuit hosted, which he attended mostly for the free pizza, he argued to a senior engineering leader that Quickbase, which Intuit sold as a database, was not a database. "I was dorking out, but if I strongly believe in something, I'm happy to voice it and go after it," he said. Weeks later Intuit flew him to Mountain View, California, and offered him a job.
He stayed seven years, working on QuickBooks and building Mint. In 2013 he and his wife applied for a mortgage on their first home, were rejected after weeks of paperwork, and had to start over with another lender. "My wife commented that it was harder to get a mortgage than deliver our first child, and that involved 30 hours of labor," he said. He then joined the core founding team at Blend, which sells mortgage software to banks.
A Holiday Dinner Full of Doctors
The idea for Notable came at a holiday dinner where six family members were doctors and all of them complained about the manual work of practicing medicine. In 2017 he started the company with Blend colleagues Adam Ting and Justin White in his Burlingame, California garage and a small office on the Stanford campus. Its first product, focused on burnout, did not sell, and a later Apple Watch dictation tool for doctors struggled too. "I'm the worst salesperson that there could ever be," he remembered thinking.
In March 2020 he stopped every project at the company to help hospitals with COVID, and Notable built software to find high-risk patients and then to book vaccine appointments. It has since gone back to automating front-office work. "Imagine not having to make a phone call ever again in the healthcare system, not for scheduling appointments, verifying insurance, making referrals, or collecting payments," he said. "That's what we're working on."