A Q&A with Viraj Narayanan, CEO

Cornerstone AI is publishing a series of Q&As with team members to provide more information and context on their role at Cornerstone AI, as well as their professional background. This is the ninth post of the series. Visit our blog to see previous posts in the series.

Your background is in decision science, operations, and marketing—can you tell me a little about why you chose to go into that field in the first place?

I’ve always been curious about how people make decisions and how data play a role in that, whether informally or formally. I studied decision science at Carnegie Mellon, which breaks down decision-making in a scientific way through combining engineering, psychology, and economics. Decision science exposes gaps in economic theory, which assumes rational decision-making, where in the real-world people often behave unpredictably. I thought this was a powerful insight and lucky for me the CMU curriculum satiated my appetite of wanting to learn more. As one example of an insight, people often prefer avoiding a $5 dollar loss to gaining $5 dollars, which contradicts the idea that both outcomes should carry equal weight - this is called loss aversion.

I’ve always also been interested in healthcare—I even pursued a pre-med track in undergrad. One of my earliest formative experiences was working on the bench at a biotech company, using pipettes to conduct immunology research on human cells. It was fascinating to see how ground-level work leads to real results, and I knew I wanted to stay connected to it, though not as a researcher myself. Looking back, I can see how these two areas: how data drives decisions and the intersection of healthcare have come together in my current journey at Cornerstone.

You also worked with companies including Ontada by McKesson and COTA Healthcare before coming to Cornerstone AI—was there anything in particular that compelled you to make this change?

I moved from healthcare consulting to technology because I wanted my effort (input) to translate into greater impact (output). That mission led me to COTA, which specialized in extracting unstructured data from cancer patients’ electronic medical records to accelerate drug discovery. Since only about 3–10% of US cancer patients participate in clinical trials, understanding outcomes in the “real world” is essential. As health records were just becoming digitized, we rode that wave and scaled the life sciences business from a few million to over twenty million dollars in revenue.

Later, I joined Ontada, a McKesson business, where I encountered entirely new challenges—and discovered the issue Cornerstone now tackles: ensuring data quality at scale. Being part of a Fortune 10 organization also taught me to navigate the complexities of a much larger corporate structure. These experiences reinforced my passion for harnessing healthcare data to drive meaningful change.

On a day-to-day basis, what does your work look like? What drives you to continue the work each day?

There are four major buckets or categories of things I spend time on:

1.     Business model:  How and where do we compete? What are we selling? How are we positioning? What are going to be our scaling points? What will drive more repeatability?

2.     Go-to-market execution: Engaging with our current and prospective customers, refining our business development process, and improving tools like marketing collateral.

3.     Team & culture: Regular syncs, team quarterly offsites, collaborative problem solving, and tracking progress.

4.     Investor and board relationships: Meeting with existing and potential investors, including board members, to manage expectations and address key issues

What does the future hold for Cornerstone AI?

I believe that in 10 years, we’ll be stunned by how many things we used to handle manually. Cornerstone is helping lead that transformation: driving productivity in research organizations, reducing costs, improving clinical research quality, and shortening the time it takes to conduct it. All without trade-offs!

Seeing our customers’ results shows me how these solutions can scale to tackle massive industry challenges. Right now, we are focused on data quality assessments, data standardization (with a focus on labs) and data transformation tasks such as schema mapping and harmonization, all of which have major potential for industry wide impact. You can think of us as becoming the “Moody’s of healthcare data quality.”

One of the reasons I am in healthcare is the positive impact we can have on patients. By enabling faster, cheaper, and more reliable research, we help make a real difference in patient outcomes. We may not conduct the research directly, but we are definitely fueling it and seeing the tangible benefits for our customers keeps me inspired.

What are you most proud of in your professional and/or personal life?

One of my proudest accomplishments was during my time at COTA, where our team partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb on a groundbreaking CAR T-cell therapy for multiple myeloma patients who have historically poor clinical outcomes. We helped define the right inclusion and exclusion criteria for their trial using real-world data, built a robust external control arm dataset with all key clinical characteristics, and ultimately contributed to the FDA submission for a single arm trial utilizing an external control. In March 2021, Abecma became the first CAR T-cell therapy approved for multiple myeloma and has subsequently had broader clinical impact in other indications. Being part of a moment of significant patient benefit still energizes me. I’m grateful for the hard work and collaboration it took to get there. In many ways, the enduring relationships formed under tight deadlines only make that success more meaningful. When I found out that Abecma was approved, feeling the weight of the process, I was brought to emotion and cried tears of happiness.

Away from work, being a dad to two young boys is my most rewarding role. Watching them grow, trying to guide them through life’s early lessons, and attempting to keep up with their boundless energy is both challenging and deeply fulfilling. I know I’ll look back on these busy days and treasure every moment.

What are you passionate about outside of work?

I’m a curious person who likes to learn and try new things. I’m into listening to podcasts on far-ranging topics and reading books, with an emphasis on autobiographies (it is enlightening to me to hear how people’s journeys go and how they think about them!). Cooking, traveling, and sports are things that keep my occupied when I am not running after my boys.