Fawad Butt

Fawad most recently was an Executive-in-Residence at Canvas Ventures, a venture capital firm with $3B under management. During his time at Canvas, he worked closely with the Managing Partners to evaluate healthcare investments and help the firm drive a data analytics, AI and machine learning thesis. He was involved with the following portfolio companies as a board observer and technical leader: Particle Health, Vida Health and PineCove Health. Prior to his work at Canvas Ventures, Fawad served as the Chief Data Officer at UnitedHealth Group (UHG) and Optum, leading the industry’s largest team of data and analytics experts and managing a multi-hundred-million dollar P&L. At Optum, he was responsible for overseeing the end-to-end data and analytics capabilities, platforms, products, tools and services across the enterprise. Under his leadership, his team modernized key data and analytics capabilities to support the ever-evolving analytical needs across the UHG and Optum businesses. Fawad fostered a culture of innovation across the analytics ecosystem, encouraged experimentation with new methods and technologies, and invested in talent and tools to deliver a robust digital foundation for the enterprise, enabling best-in-class care and cost outcomes for the $60M UHG members. Prior to UHG, Fawad served as the Chief Data Governance & Chief Data Officer at Kaiser Permanente. At Kaiser, Fawad helped define the industry’s most robust Data Governance Model, led an enterprise wide Data Privacy & Security initiative, and built the foundational data and analytics capabilities which allowed Kaiser to be market leading in digital care delivery for years to follow. Before Kaiser, Fawad was the Global Head of Data Strategy at the Northern Trust Bank where he built the global data sovereignty and residency spanning 31 countries and regions. He also architected the Data Quality, Data Governance, Master Data Management and big data capabilities which allowed the company to save over $80 million dollars by removing redundant processes and systems.. Earlier in his career, Fawad held numerous roles at Sun Microsystems and ended his career at the company managing the sales engineering teams representing a third of the US software sales . Fawad has a MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelors in Electronics Engineering from East West University in Chicago. He serves as an advisor and board member to several data, analytics and healthcare startups and often publishes on the topics of ML, data analytics and AI in healthcare.