Episode 42: Buvna Ayyagari

In this episode of the Titanium Economy Podcast, Buvna Ayyagari, SVP of New Ventures at Synopsys, talks to Vineet Gupta, President and Head of Semiconductor at Ayna about how the simulation and AI capabilities that transformed chip design can also revolutionize health and life sciences. She explains how Synopsys, further strengthened by its ANSYS acquisition, is uniquely positioned to apply its multi-physics simulation and AI expertise to the hardest problems in health and life sciences. Buvna draws a parallel between the evolution of EDA in chip design and the journey ahead for healthcare, arguing that ecosystem collaboration, standardization, and reusable models are key to accelerating adoption. She also shares her personal mission to make quality healthcare universally accessible through technology, and offers career advice centered on curiosity, resilience, and following your passion.

Buvna Ayyagari is SVP of New Ventures at Synopsys, where she leads the company's expansion into health and life sciences, applying AI-powered multi-physics simulation to improve patient and population-level outcomes. Her career spans senior roles at Intel, Applied Materials, and Renesas, including scaling Synopsys's Interface IP business and building a materials-to-systems digital twin platform at Applied Materials.

Discussion Points

• Synopsys Today and the ANSYS Acquisition: Synopsys has grown from an EDA software provider into a full silicon-to-systems engineering company. The ANSYS acquisition adds deep multi-physics simulation capabilities that make the healthcare push possible.
• New Ventures' Charter and Healthcare's AI Inflection Point: New Ventures applies Synopsys's simulation assets beyond silicon. Healthcare AI adoption is now outpacing most other sectors, though current use is concentrated in efficiency gains rather than patient outcomes.
• AI-Powered Simulation in Practice: The most mature use cases are in cardiovascular medicine, spanning device design, patient-specific sizing, positioning, and post-placement risk assessment. Biology's variability and ethical constraints make it a fundamentally harder modeling problem than chip design.
• The EDA Playbook: Just as EDA evolved from fragmented tools into a vertically integrated, standardized workflow, Health & Life Sciences needs the same journey. Reusable, FDA-approved simulation models, shared across the ecosystem, are the key to accelerating adoption.
• Regulatory Progress and Economic Incentives: The FDA's growing acceptance of simulation-based evidence and emerging per-case reimbursement models are the two forces that need to align for computational healthcare to scale.

For More Information

Buvna Ayyagari LinkedIn

Synopsys Inc

The Titanium Economy

Ayna Website