Overview
Malinka Walaliyadde is the chief executive officer, co-founder, and board member of Akasa, a South San Francisco company applying generative artificial intelligence to healthcare revenue cycle management. Akasa’s leadership page lists Walaliyadde alongside co-founders Ben Beadle-Ryby, Andy Atwal, and advisor Varun Ganapathi, Ph.D. The company builds custom large language models trained on health-system clinical and financial data for medical coding, clinical documentation integrity, and mid-cycle automation.
Akasa positions administrative inefficiency as a driver of U.S. healthcare cost burden — a mission statement aimed at CFO and revenue-cycle executives evaluating GenAI mid-cycle tools.
Role and company
As CEO and co-founder, Walaliyadde leads Akasa’s executive team including CRO Ben Beadle-Ryby, CPO Cory Costley, CTO Sanjay Siddhanti, and VP of Clinical Strategy Nirav Kamdar, MD. Akasa operates remote-first with U.S. headquarters in South San Francisco per its about page. The AKASA Platform connects documentation and coding into unified workflows customized for each health system’s clinical and operational nuances.
Walaliyadde is the quoted executive voice in major health-system partnership releases, including Cleveland Clinic’s expansion from AI coding to systemwide CDI deployment announced October 13, 2025.
Background and career context
Akasa’s about page describes Walaliyadde co-founding the company in 2019 in South San Francisco with a team blending Silicon Valley engineering and healthcare revenue cycle veterans. The company name derives from Sanskrit akasa — sky or ether — framed as a fifth element uniting patients, providers, payers, and pharma in healthcare finance.
Walaliyadde’s leadership page identifies her as CEO, co-founder, and board member without listing prior employers on the cited official page — consistent with this profile’s policy of citing only verifiable official biographical claims.
Company-building or leadership context
Walaliyadde built Akasa from founding in 2019 through enterprise deployments at large health systems. Cleveland Clinic completed AKASA AI coding rollout across all U.S. locations in four months in 2025, then expanded to systemwide GenAI CDI after completing the first CDI pilot — a land-and-expand pattern Walaliyadde’s team executed under her CEO tenure.
Akasa’s investor roster on its leadership page includes Andreessen Horowitz, BOND, and Costanoa Ventures, reflecting venture confidence in revenue-cycle GenAI as margin-protection infrastructure for hospitals.
Public milestones
October 13, 2025: Akasa and Cleveland Clinic announced expanded partnership deploying GenAI CDI solution systemwide after successful pilot. Early 2025: Cleveland Clinic completed AKASA AI coding rollout across all U.S. locations in four months per the same release. Akasa, Cleveland Clinic, and Duke University Health System presented a GenAI mid-cycle panel at AHIMA 2025 per company press materials.
Walaliyadde is named CEO and co-founder in the October 2025 Cleveland Clinic release.
Why their work matters
Revenue cycle GenAI is moving from coding-only pilots into CDI — a workflow where documentation nuance directly affects quality metrics and reimbursement integrity. Walaliyadde’s Cleveland Clinic sequential rollout gives other health systems a reference architecture for mid-cycle AI governance, distinct from ambient clinical AI that generates documentation upstream of coding.
For readers tracking healthcare AI economics, Akasa under Walaliyadde tests whether custom LLMs trained on institutional data outperform generic models in compliance-sensitive mid-cycle roles.
Sources and references
Primary sourcing: Akasa leadership page and About Us, reviewed July 10, 2026.
- Akasa — Leadership (akasa.com)
- Akasa — About Us (akasa.com)
Cleveland Clinic partnership milestones from Akasa press release dated October 13, 2025 cited on akasa.com.