Akshay Sharma
Verified Expert in Finance
Technology Advisory Expert
Santa Cruz, CA, United States
Toptal member since January 24, 2023
Akshay is an entrepreneur, executive, and management consultant focused on solving key business problems. As a technology strategy executive, he has worked with Fortune 500 organizations on data platforms, AI, machine learning, and launching data products. Akshay has a proven track record in bringing products to market and managing technical, operational, and financial risks.
Work Experience
Entrepreneur In Residence
Elevance Health
- Identified, built, and launched digital data products to the market while serving as an entrepreneur in residence.
- Drove data foundation and data architecture to enable new digital solutions. The key focus was on machine learning and NLP to increase revenue opportunities and decrease operational costs.
- Developed the go-to-market strategy for commercializing the product.
CEO
Hammer Of The Gods
- Co-founded Hammer Of the Gods, a deep tech company focused on bringing AI and machine learning to edge devices. Built and patented container technology for edge computing.
- Raised over $1 million in pre-seed funding from top Silicon Valley venture capitals. Commercialized the first WebAssembly-based machine learning runtime for any device or cloud.
- Led sales efforts and closed deals with customers, which resulted in the acquisition of our technology by one of our key customers.
Executive Vice President
Sharecare
- Joined the company through the acquisition of doc.ai, which has built industry-leading AI for remote virtual clinical trials and is a holder of several patents in the field of private computing on healthcare data.
- Led AI strategy and implementation for a public company as part of the executive team. Involved in a new market and product creation.
- Built Silicon Valley's top healthcare AI team and grew it to 50+ engineers before the acquisition. Involved in closing and delivering deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Hired professionals from schools such as MIT, Stanford, and Berkley and places like Google and Facebook to build a world-class talent in AI in healthcare.
Head of Product and Engineering
Human API
- Built the nation's first healthcare API for most types of health data, including labs, pharmacies, medical records, and devices. Pioneered consumer-mediated access to health data.
- Designed and built a clinical data platform. The data platform included ingesting, parsing, data quality checking, and ETL in near real time. Engineered the data platform to achieve robustness and reliability.
- Drove HIPAA compliance, security, and information security to serve hundreds of healthcare customers.
Lead Engineer
Ensighten (acquired by Cheq.ai)
- Built a tag-serving platform. Started as a senior engineer and grew to a lead engineer managing the entire product.
- Created a client-side data layer for conditional tag firing and a no-code environment for any marketer to build and deploy tags with advanced controls for firing them.
- Managed and grew the team to support the most critical revenue product for Ensighten.
Software Engineer (Contract)
3M
- Contributed to enterprise security products by writing a large amount of code across several key enterprise web applications. Worked on in-house tools for performance monitoring.
- Developed and maintained a suite of common product components. The components were API and web-based products used by many other platform applications.
- Played a key role as a member of the application platform team working on content management system APIs, platform security, and performance engineering. The platform team scaled three million digital products across 60+ countries.
Skills
Finance
Fundraising, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Pricing, Pricing Strategy, Financial Modeling, Risk Analysis
Other
Cloud, Data Engineering, Markets, Data Products, New Products, Digital Health, Management, Strategy, Product Management, APIs, ETL, HIPAA Compliance, Platforms, No-code Development, Investor Presentations, Pitch Decks, Pitch Presentations, Business Strategy, Go-to-market Plans, Cloud Computing, Enterprise SaaS, Software as a Service (SaaS), Product Strategy, Data Science, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Product Growth, Partnerships, Business Development, Customer Success, Docker, Security, Infrastructure, Performance Tuning, Scalability, Machine Learning, Pricing, Management Consulting, Market Risk, Risk Modeling, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Sales, Cryptography, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)
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