By Mareska Chettiar, Co-T/E Life Editor
Forbes featured siblings Kanishka Rao, a 2014 alumnus, and Jahnavi Rao, a 2018 alumna, in its 30 under 30 North America 2025 list under the categories of healthcare and social impact, respectively. Kanishka Rao is the co-founder of Carenostics, a company that uses artificial intelligence to address the underdiagnosis of chronic diseases. Jahnavi Rao is the founder of New Voters, a nonprofit organization focused on registering high school students to vote.
Kanishka Rao studied economics and computer science under the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology at the University of Pennsylvania after graduating Conestoga. He interned at Blackstone, an investment management company, and McKinsey, a consulting company, where he worked in multiple fields like higher education, finance and pharmaceuticals before he realized that he wanted to pursue a healthcare career.
“I spent my last years at McKinsey working with healthcare startups in the U.S.,” Kanishka Rao said. “Loved it, (I) thought this was how I was gonna have my impact in healthcare. But then this tragedy happened.”
When the Raos’ grandfather passed away from undiagnosed chronic kidney disease, Kanishka Rao decided to co-found Carenostics with his father, Bharat Rao shortly after.
“Had he been diagnosed in an earlier stage, there are preventative treatments and he may have still been alive today,” Kanishka Rao said. “It felt like an obvious area to apply machine learning and AI to see (if we could) find patients like him earlier.”
Carenostics uses an AI model that learns from large healthcare databases. It gives patient insights to the physician based on their medical history and flags potential high-risk conditions. To date, the company has evaluated over seven million patients.
“Doctors have so much pressure on their time,” Kanishka Rao said. “AI and machine learning can find patterns in the data that humans don’t have time to see or potentially ones that they can’t find but make sense once they see (the patterns).”
Jahnavi Rao started New Voters as a club at the end of her junior year at Conestoga after the results of the 2016 election. She ran the club’s first voter drive her senior year, and the organization officially became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on May 2, 2018.
“I was a junior. I remember talking to people in the grade above me who were posting these long posts about the results of the election and asking them if they had voted. A lot of them said no,” Jahnavi Rao said. “That was so frustrating. I would’ve done anything to be able to vote.”
After graduating Conestoga, Jahnavi Rao studied public policy and music at Harvard University and founded the Harvard Votes Challenge, an organization focused on registering people to vote at the collegiate level. It has a high school engagement branch, which worked with New Voters.
“When I went to college, I knew that I wanted to keep doing New Voters because this opportunity (was something) I really cared about,” Jahnavi Rao said. “I had this incredible group of people I was learning from and working with.”
New Voters and the Harvard Votes Challenge came together to form the Boston Votes initiative, which aimed to register students to vote in the Boston Public Schools district, which contained 16 high schools at the time. Since its inception, New Voters has begun chapters in approximately 1,000 high schools all over the nation and has raised about $800,000 in fundraisers this year.
“I feel incredibly grateful and lucky,” Jahnavi Rao said. “It is really bizarre getting an award personally for work that is done by 50 people (on staff) and thousands of students across the country. I feel humbled and honored to represent all the people that make up New Voters.”
The siblings look forward to attending the Forbes 30 under 30 events together, like the upcoming summit in New York. They encourage youth to follow their passions and become catalysts for change.
“Over time, fewer and fewer students actually stick to trying to innovate (and) build startups (and) nonprofits. My sister and I are just people who still wanted to try,” Kanishka Rao said. “To everyone at ’Stoga, just go for it. There’s so much time and so many things to do.”
Mareska Chettiar can be reached at [email protected].
