Company leader
Shankar Somasundaram
Founder and CEO
Asimily
Shankar Somasundaram is the founder and chief executive of Asimily, a cybersecurity company that protects the medical, laboratory, and other internet-connected devices that hospitals and drug makers depend on. He started it in late 2017 after building the security business for internet-connected devices at Symantec. He began as an engineer in mobile phone technology and holds more than 60 granted patents.
Turning to Engineering
Many of his relatives, including cousins in India and the United States, are doctors, and he wanted to be one himself. He was about to enroll in a top medical college in India when a series of circumstances stopped him, and he chose engineering instead.
He holds a bachelor's degree from Mumbai University in India, a master's degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey, and an MBA from London Business School.
Along the way he built a remote health monitoring product in India and an app that found the nearest blood donor with a matching blood type.
Building Device Security at Symantec
At Qualcomm he worked on early 3G mobile technology, including noise cancellation and call processing. At InterDigital he ran product management for 3G modem technology licensed to Apple for the iPhone.
At Symantec he first ran corporate strategy and business development for the Veritas storage unit. He then designed Symantec's strategy for the Internet of Things, the machines and sensors that connect to company networks, and started and ran its security business for those devices, which grew to about 100 people and sold to industrial, retail, and automotive companies in the United States and Europe.
Founding Asimily
While looking at different industries at Symantec, he found that hospitals were being sold device security built for ordinary office IT, which did not fit medical devices or clinical work. He founded Asimily to build security for those devices, and Hithesh Nama joined him as co-founder. The name comes from the idea of assimilating data from many sources.
Asimily's software finds every device on a health system's network, ranks which weak points matter most, recommends specific fixes, flags unusual behavior, helps teams investigate an incident afterward, and shows how much each device is used.
Its customers include health systems in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and the health system MemorialCare is both a customer and an investor.
On the Censinet Risk Never Sleeps podcast he put his view of the work plainly: "We are not just building a business, we are saving patient lives, is how I see it."
Competitive Chess in College
In college he played chess and table tennis at an advanced level, and outside work he follows economics and how international markets move.
He has two children, and the pandemic years gave him more time with them.