» About the FounderAbout the Founder
Palani Perumal
Founder & CEO, Deevita
CEO & Founder @ Deevita · AI Product & Platform Leader in Regulated Pharma & Healthcare · HL7 Vulcan & NCPDP Member · Ex-Microsoft · MIT Sloan
Palani Perumal founded Deevita on a perspective built across three decades and four distinct domains – pharma regulatory AI, Microsoft-scale platform engineering, healthcare benefit administration, and pharmacy operations. Few in the industry have operated at depth in even one of these. He has built production systems in all of them.
A Journey Through Platform Innovation & Impact
Deevita – From Analytics Services to AI Platform
Deevita was founded in 2015 as an AI and data consultancy for healthcare and life sciences. Over 10 years it evolved from analytics modernisation and cloud architecture into a platform company focused on AI-powered pharma regulatory and drug information infrastructure. Delivering AI systems for pharma product labelling and regulatory compliance at a US-based pharma major – in a pharma-regulated production environment – was a milestone that brought together the technical, domain, and delivery capabilities Deevita had been building across a decade of healthcare and life sciences engagements.
PepPill – 600+ Pharmacies and the Dispensing Side of the Medication Chain
Palani bootstrapped PepPill from zero to 600+ community pharmacies across India over 7 years – building a full omnichannel pharmacy platform and operating a licensed pharma distribution business serving those pharmacies through a group purchase model. On the supply side: procurement, licensed distribution, and warehouse management. On the retail side: pharmacy management system, e-commerce storefront, and patient engagement. This is not market research about how pharmacies work. It is 7 years of hands-on operational depth – as both platform builder and licensed distributor – in how drugs actually move from manufacturer through the supply chain to the dispensing counter to the patient.
Microsoft – Platform Engineering at Global Scale
Nine years at Microsoft as a Senior Product Manager and Program Manager gave Palani the product DNA that distinguishes Deevita from a services-only firm. At Bing, he owned the measurement and instrumentation platform – data strategy, web service APIs, and analytics at a scale few product leaders ever encounter. At Windows, he delivered the metadata API and data experiences for Windows 7, earning two patents in the process. The core lesson from Microsoft: platforms are not products. They are data networks that compound in value as each new participant joins. That insight drives the Deevita platform architecture.
MIT Sloan – Where the Platform Thinking Started
A Master’s in Engineering and Management at MIT’s Sloan School and Engineering Systems Division gave Palani the framework he has applied across every subsequent venture: systems thinking, platform economics, and the discipline to separate a business model from a technology feature. His graduate thesis – on business model strategy for radiologists using Electronic Health Records – was an early signal of a career-long focus on the intersection of regulated healthcare and data technology.
Alegeus – SaaS Platform for Benefits Administration and Healthcare Payments
Four years architecting the data infrastructure for Alegeus (then MED-I-BANK) gave Palani deep operational understanding of how healthcare benefit administration actually works – from the inside of a SaaS platform processing real money. The platform connected benefit accounts (HSA, FSA, HRA) to a healthcare payment layer: debit card transactions enabling patients to pay for healthcare expenses directly from their benefit accounts, backed by real-time financial infrastructure connecting pharmacies, banks, and payers at scale, all within HIPAA-compliant data architecture. This foundation is what makes Deevita’s healthcare analytics and interoperability work genuinely operational, not theoretical.
HL7 Vulcan & NCPDP – Writing the Standards, Not Just Implementing Them
As an active member of the HL7 Vulcan EPI & APIX Working Group, Palani contributes to writing the Electronic Product Information FHIR Implementation Guide – the standard EU pharma manufacturers must implement to comply with EMA ePI mandates.
As an NCPDP Innovation Committee member, he contributes to U.S. pharmacy interoperability standards discussions and standards development. This combination – contributing to the drug information standard on the manufacturer side and deep pharmacy dispensing operations knowledge on the pharmacy side – is the perspective that informs Deevita’s pharma and healthcare platform work.