The tech industry has quite a few larger-than-life executives who are given credit for the innovations made by their companies. In reality, though, innovation is a team effort, one driven by people at all levels of an organization. The Bay Area is filled with companies working tirelessly to solve real problems and reshaping their industries in the process, and we’re pulling back the curtain and spotlighting two local tech innovators at Twin Health and Clumio.
Abhik Banerjee, director of machine learning and data engineering at Twin Health, is pioneering new ways to use tech and data to treat chronic illnesses. Lawrence Chang, director of engineering at Clumio, is developing technology to protect enterprise data in the cloud and defang threats from cyber criminals.
Banerjee and Chang are not household names in the tech industry, but their work is no less innovative or important because of it. Continue reading to learn more about just what they’re up to.
Just about every tech company has either moved its data to the cloud or is in the process of doing so. While making server rooms a thing of the past is nice, storing data off-premises raises security concerns, which Clumio is working to allay with its air-gapped backup as a service platform for AWS.
As more enterprise companies move their valuable — and sensitive — data to the cloud, threats against it will naturally grow. Lawrence Chang, director of engineering, and his team are working toward a future where those concerns can be solved quickly with just a few clicks.
What’s the coolest project you’re working on at the moment or have worked on recently? What makes/made this project so innovative or exciting?
My team and I recently helped launch Clumio into the AWS Marketplace, a curated collection of trusted software from which customers can discover new products. In Clumio’s case, the team helped introduce backup as a service to the masses. As a SaaS offering, there is no hardware required and now anyone with an AWS account can effortlessly sign up and start protecting critical data immediately. Moreover, the team not only launched into marketplace but implemented consumption-based pricing.
There is no charge to sign up and customers are free to look around and even try “Discover,” Clumio’s enhanced reporting and visualization tool that helps customers identify gaps in data protection, which was another great project my team and I worked on! While technical challenges made this project exciting, its impact on sales made it highly rewarding. The effort furthered Clumio’s cloud-first messaging and brought together engineers with sales, marketing, PMs and more.
Each day at Clumio, I come in knowing that I’m helping to shape the future of data protection.”
What do you envision for the future of your industry? And how is your work helping to shape that future and bring it to life?
Data is at the heart of any enterprise, and as adoption of the cloud grows, it is widely anticipated that more and more of this data will shift to the public cloud. The work that Clumio does helps enterprises protect this ever-growing source of data and provides peace of mind against data loss. Unlike traditional on-premise backup vendors, Clumio provides air-gapped, immutable backups that protect against ransomware in an easy-to-use self-service model without the hassles of hardware setup.
Each day at Clumio, I come in knowing that I’m helping to shape the future of data protection with our cloud-native platform that, best of all, affords me the opportunity to tinker with and learn about the latest public cloud technologies. Clumio’s cloud-first mentality allows us to harness the scalability and elasticity of the cloud to develop solutions that are not constrained by fixed resources like CPU, memory or storage. In addition, CI/CD allows Clumio to rapidly iterate, deploy new solutions, garner feedback and improve. It is a fundamental departure from the way legacy backup providers approached data protection and I feel lucky to be along for the ride.
In a country where over 34 million people currently have Type 2 diabetes, taking preventative measures to improve one’s health has never appeared more dire. The catch? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for preventing chronic disease.
That’s where Twin Health comes in. Abhik Banerjee and his team is on a mission to use AI to help people improve their metabolic health, reverse chronic diseases and stay healthy for life.
What’s the coolest project you’re working on at the moment or have worked on recently? What makes/made this project so innovative or exciting?
One of the key contributions from our team was to create our patented “GFY,” or “green for you,” model. Something interesting to note is that the postprandial glucose response for any given food, prepared in the same way and in the same quantity, is very different for every individual. So, just reducing carbs or increasing proteins will not work for every person. Every individual’s metabolism is different and there are a lot of factors that go into this, including their past glucose levels, including how they slept last night, different macro, micro and biota nutrients, their activity and heart rate features.
Our GFY model can accurately predict — with over 90 percent precision — the glycemic response for a given food or meal for a given person. This gives healthy recommendations to our members to help reverse chronic diseases and sustain long-term metabolic health.
Our goal is to use AI and machine learning to help people improve their metabolic health, reverse chronic diseases and keep them healthy for life.”
What do you envision for the future of your industry? And how is your work helping to shape that future and bring it to life?
We are transforming the health care space and helping our members reverse chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes and keeping them healthy for life. In the United States, over 34 million people have Type 2 diabetes, or one in every 10 adults, and that number is even larger if we look at prediabetes, which over 88 million people have, or one in every three adults. Unfortunately, these conditions are becoming more and more prevalent every year, and traditional treatments have not been very effective in addressing them.
Twin helps to solve this problem through our “Whole Body Digital Twin” platform, which generates precise treatment recommendations tailored to each member’s metabolism that balance health and happiness. Our digital twin platform is powered by many amazing machine learning models, including GFY, which creates nutritional recommendations to reverse diabetes and heal the member’s metabolism. Besides this, our platform generates insights and recommendations for exercise, sleep and meditative breathing to personalize the experience for each individual member to keep them healthy and happy.
