Amil

Meet Our Founder & CEO

Amil Khanzada

Doctorate of Engineering Candidate, University of Fukui, Japan. Former MBA & Master of Engineering (Data Science) Joint-Degree Student, UC Berkeley.

Specially Appointed Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering, University of Fukui, Japan

Amil's Story
Born and raised in the Silicon Valley in an immigrant family, Amil attended homeschooling and began studying at community college while 14 years old. Amil father's dedication to social service shaped him, with a childhood filled with volunteer activities such as feeding the homeless at soup kitchens. Amil would take his first job as a software consultant developing image recognition technology for automated grading of tests in K-12 schools.
After receiving his B.A. in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley, Amil joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Silicon Valley to work full-time as a software engineer developing security log standardization software for ArcSight, a Security Information and Event Management System (SIEM).
Seeking a new home, Amil transferred to HP’s Tokyo headquarters to take on a role as cybersecurity consultant, in which he traveled across Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Australia to deploy SIEM solutions at customer sites in the banking industry.

Amil with nursing staff supporting Virufy’s clinical studies in Columbia, South America.

Thereafter, Amil returned to Silicon Valley to join Pivotal Software as a software engineer working primarily on the Postgres-based open source Greenplum OLAP database. In Pivotal’s extreme programming (XP) environment, Amil practiced several software development practices, including daily pair programming, test-driven development (TDD), and weekly retroactive meetings, while rotating across several teams, including DevOps, database backend, and workload management tooling.

Amil with Japanese students and staff in ZenIT programming school.

In 2018, Amil took leave from work to move to the countryside of Japan. Living in Eiheiji town, the birthplace of Soto Zen, Amil meditated daily and learned Zen philosophy, while giving back teaching agile programming to young adults and children. Soon, Amil was appointed Evolution Ambassador of the town and sent to the One Young World conference in the Netherlands to represent Japan, amongst other young social impact leaders, country heads, and Nobel Laureates from 195 countries.

Amil’s encounter with former Prime Minister and current NATO president Mark Rutte.

In late 2019, Amil left his job to pursue graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, taking his first courses with Coursera founder Dr. Andrew Ng and ImageNet creator Dr. Fei-Fei Li. When the pandemic hit, Amil committed himself to pandemic relief efforts and soon founded Virufy.
Virufy is a nonprofit organization developing a smartphone app to prescreen for COVID-19 instantly through AI-powered analysis of voice and cough recordings. As of July 2024, the organization operates in a three continents with more than 250 volunteers and 60 partner organizations.