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[Palo Alto, CA, 8/5/26] — Loka, an AWS Premier Tier consulting partner and AWS Innovation Partner of the Year, today announced the promotion of Sushmitha Regulapati, previously Vice President of Healthcare and Life Sciences, to Senior Vice President of Healthcare and Life Sciences. Sushmitha brings two decades in healthcare data to the role, with data and product leadership at Cleveland Clinic, Evolent Health and Nuna, and joined Loka in 2023 to build its healthcare practice. She now owns Loka's HCLS verticals strategy and growth across North America, expanding from the East Coast to all of NAMER with support from Loka's territory sales leadership teams. Her promotion comes as healthcare and life sciences reaches nearly 60% of Loka's business and as AWS doubles down on the same vertical.
In her new role, Sushmitha leads GTM strategy, offerings and marketing for HCLS alongside Loka's cross-functional teams, and serves as the named executive relationship owner with AWS HCLS partner and field teams globally. She also leads negotiation strategy and key account planning for Loka's highest-value strategic opportunities, and will lead Loka's partnership presence at the industry's defining events, including HIMSS, HLTH, ViVE and AWS re:Invent. Her team expands across sales, customer success and delivery to support the growth.
“Healthcare and life sciences leaders don't have a pilot problem. They have a production problem," Regulapati said. "I've spent two decades in healthcare data — inside a health system, inside a payer, inside the platform companies. The model has never once been the hard part. It's reconciling claims, clinical and utilization data across systems that were never built to talk to each other, and making the result auditable. That work comes before the agent, not after."
Sushmitha's promotion reflects where Loka has invested most heavily. HCLS accounts for nearly 60% of the company's projects, spanning drug discovery, clinical data, connected labs, medtech, payer and provider platforms. Loka has delivered more than 500 GenAI and agentic projects since 2023, with 50% in or moving to production. With dedicated Bioengineering and Compliance departments, the AWS Healthcare Competency, AWS-certified teams and AWS funding pathways including MAP, GenAIIC and SCA, Loka helps HCLS customers and AWS teams move with greater speed and less risk.
Much of that work starts in the unglamorous layer. Stanford's 2026 AI Index, drawing on McKinsey's annual State of AI survey, found that AI uptake remains lowest in risk and compliance functions across nearly every sector, the exact functions that gate deployment in healthcare. That gap is becoming a deadline rather than a roadmap item: CMS-0057-F requires impacted payers to stand up FHIR-based prior authorization and patient access APIs by January 2027, making interoperability a compliance obligation with a date attached.
"Sushmitha has helped build our HCLS business into one of the strongest parts of Loka, one customer outcome at a time," said Bobby Mukherjee, CEO and Founder of Loka. "She knows this industry, she knows AWS, and she knows how to get regulated AI into production. Giving her the full vertical means our HCLS customers and our AWS HCLS partners get a single senior owner accountable for their results."
About Loka
Loka, the AWS 2024 Innovation Partner of the Year, builds GenAI and cloud-native solutions that power startups, SMBs and enterprises in dozens of industries, with a special focus on regulated spaces like Healthcare and Life Sciences. Loka is an AWS Premier Tier Partner and top migration partner that regularly contributes to the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center and has delivered thousands of launches since 2004, applying a compliance-first approach so AI systems are secure, governed and production-ready from day one. Between launches their teams build in LokaLabs, developing novel solutions like ADDA™️, a conversational LLM-based agent that accelerates therapeutic drug development. Learn more at loka.com.
Media Contact
Daniel Goldberg | daniel@loka.com
