Co-founder & Former General Counsel, Waymark, Inc.

Afia Asamoah is a healthcare technology executive, founder, attorney and board director with 20 years of experience helping innovative healthcare companies navigate regulatory complexity, manage enterprise risk, build scalable businesses and bring new technologies to market.

Afia has worked at the forefront of healthcare technology and innovation throughout her career. At Google, she served as the company’s first healthcare lawyer, advising teams developing medical software and AI technologies, where she successfully negotiated Google’s first patent licensing and collaboration deal with Novartis (NYSE:NVS). She subsequently helped establish Verily Life Sciences, where she participated in $800 million and $1B financing rounds and served as Verily’s first Trust and Compliance Officer. 

As a co-founder and senior executive of Waymark, a venture-backed healthcare technology company, Afia gained firsthand experience building and scaling a company from the ground up. She helped shape the company’s strategy and business model, established the organizational infrastructure, and structured and negotiated Medicaid managed care health plan risk contracts and health system contracts to scale the company to 4 US markets. As Head of People from 2021-2026, she oversaw the hiring and scaling of the organization to 100+ employees across 20 states and built a culture that secured multiple Great Places to Work certifications.

In addition to Rise Up Together, Afia currently serves as a director and audit committee chair of the Lucille Packard Stanford Children’s Hospital and as a director and Vice Chair of the Public Health Institute. Afia received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, her Masters of Public Policy from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, and her BA from Harvard University.