CitiusTech Elevates Long-Tenured Leaders Dhaval Shah and Shyam Karunakaran to Top Posts Following Rajan Kohli’s Departure

MUMBAI, India — CitiusTech, a prominent global digital and enterprise AI solutions provider dedicated to the healthcare and life sciences sectors, has announced a high-profile leadership transition. Rajan Kohli will step down from his role as Chief Executive Officer by the end of August 2026 to pursue new professional opportunities. In a seamless succession plan designed to capitalize on internal institutional knowledge, the company has elevated long-serving executives Dhaval Shah to Acting Chief Executive Officer and Shyam Karunakaran to President, effective immediately.

The leadership shift comes at a crucial juncture for CitiusTech, which reported a stellar financial performance in FY26, positioning itself firmly in the top quartile of global technology services firms. Strong business momentum has carried forward into FY27, driven largely by skyrocketing market demand for specialized healthcare AI solutions, advanced cloud integration, and enterprise data analytics. The incoming leadership team will take charge of an organization that currently empowers over 140 major healthcare enterprises globally through a robust workforce of more than 7,700 healthcare technology professionals.

Dhaval Shah, who steps into the role of Acting CEO, brings nearly two decades of deep institutional experience to the position. Having spent over 19 years at CitiusTech, Shah has been instrumental in shaping the firm's core culture, values, and operating framework since its early days. Prior to his elevation, he served as the Chief Business Officer for the MedTech (HMT) and Life Sciences (HLS) markets, successfully building and scaling these key business verticals. Commenting on his vision, Shah emphasized that the company's overarching mission is to seamlessly embed intelligence into daily healthcare operations, decision-making frameworks, and patient outcome delivery, cementing CitiusTech's status as a pioneer in healthcare AI services.

Simultaneously, Shyam Karunakaran has been promoted to President, expanding his executive mandate to oversee enterprise strategy, market expansion, growth vectors, and operational execution. Having dedicated 17 years to CitiusTech, Karunakaran previously spearheaded the Payer and Platform businesses as Chief Business Officer, transforming them into formidable commercial franchises. Together, Shah and Karunakaran represent a combined 36 years of internal leadership tenure and currently manage over 80 percent of the company's total business operations.

Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., Chairman of CitiusTech, expressed full confidence in the newly appointed executives, highlighting their foundational role in the company's two-decade history and praising outgoing CEO Rajan Kohli for building a robust strategic foundation in AI. As healthcare organizations globally accelerate their digital modernization strategies and look to rebuild their technology stacks around artificial intelligence—spanning the engineering, intelligence, and agentic layers—CitiusTech's localized leadership transition positions the firm to capture massive market opportunities and deliver measurable, human-first outcomes across the healthcare ecosystem.

"The leadership transition at CitiusTech is a masterclass in strategic internal succession planning, proving that deep domain expertise and long-term institutional loyalty are invaluable assets in the fast-evolving tech services sector. Elevating veteran executives like Dhaval Shah and Shyam Karunakaran—who collectively possess nearly four decades of company history—ensures operational continuity while aggressively pivoting toward high-growth frontiers like healthcare artificial intelligence. As global healthcare enterprises increasingly migrate their core technology stacks toward advanced AI solutions, CitiusTech is uniquely positioned to scale rapidly. At StartupLanes, we observe that leadership continuity combined with visionary technological execution is the ultimate recipe for sustaining top-quartile financial growth in competitive global markets." — Dr. Shishir Gupta, Founder & CEO, StartupLanes