The Twelve-Year Apprenticeship
Venkat Kavarthapu spent twelve years building Edifecs' products before taking the founder's chair, scaling it, and selling it. Now symplr's owners want him to do it again.
Chris Colpitts had been symplr's interim chief executive since November 2025. On April 13, 2026, the Houston company's private equity owners, Clearlake Capital and Charlesbank, ended the interregnum with a specific kind of hire: an operator who had already run a healthcare software platform, scaled it, and sold it.
Venkat Kavarthapu's résumé reads as one long test for the job. He spent 12 years inside Edifecs, the health data management company, building its product and services businesses before succeeding founder Sunny Singh as chief executive in July 2021.
The Founder'S Chair
Following a founder is its own discipline. Kavarthapu's stated plan in 2021 was continuity over reinvention: "I'm excited to take on this responsibility supported by a proven, high-performing leadership team," he said at the time. What followed was expansion of the platform serving payers and providers nationwide, and, in 2025, the outcome PE owners underwrite for - Edifecs was acquired by Cotiviti.
The Second Platform
symplr is a larger canvas. The company's healthcare operations software is used by 9 of 10 U.S. hospitals and more than 400 U.S. health plans - infrastructure for the unglamorous middle of healthcare: credentialing, workforce, supply chain, compliance. Colpitts, who moves to executive chairman, framed the hire around execution: "His track record of driving growth and scaling platforms positions him to accelerate execution and build on symplr's momentum."
The complication is the assignment itself. A company that has run on an interim chief executive for five months, owned by two PE firms with a thesis to deliver, is not a caretaker post. The platform's reach is already near-total in its market; growth has to come from what the software does, not where it is installed.
The Ai Wager
Kavarthapu's bet is that operational complexity - not diagnosis, not billing glamour - is where AI pays first in healthcare. "I see a significant opportunity to harness AI to help healthcare organizations reduce operational complexity and improve the quality of care," he said on taking the role. The foundation he cites is the one he now has to compound: the platform and its customer relationships.
He has done the scale-and-exit cycle once. The owners are paying to watch him run it again, faster, from the first day.