Sameer Shariff

Founder & CEO Impelsys

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sameer Shariff is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Impelsys, a New York-headquartered technology company he started in January 2001 and has led for a quarter of a century. Impelsys builds the software layer that sits between content owners and the people who consume that content: digital publishing platforms, learning-delivery systems, and health-information products used by scientific and trade publishers, universities, hospital networks and enterprises. The company operates across the United States, the European Union and India, with its principal delivery centre in Bengaluru, and reports more than 300 customers. Impelsys is Shariff’s second venture — he co-founded the internet pharmaceutical marketing company Medsite Inc. before it was acquired by WebMD — and the pattern across both is the same: identify an industry whose distribution model is being dismantled by the internet, and build the infrastructure it needs to survive the transition.

Career Highlights

• Founded Impelsys in January 2001 in New York and remains Founder and CEO.
• Co-founded Medsite Inc., serving as Chief Strategic Officer and Executive Vice President of Sales; the company became one of the largest internet pharmaceutical marketing businesses in the United States before being acquired by WebMD.
• Launched iPublishCentral in 2009, a platform allowing publishers to hold a digital content warehouse and distribute to retailers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
• Oversaw the launch of the iPC Health platform in 2020 and its 2021 spin-off and rebranding as MedLern, a healthcare learning business.
• Opened a medical device testing facility in Mangaluru, Karnataka in 2023, extending the company from content into regulated device software validation.
• Impelsys holds ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2022 and CMMI appraisals and has received Brandon Hall, AWS and LearnX awards.
• Founding board member of The Heart & Stroke Foundation of India.

Professional Journey

Shariff’s first venture was Medsite Inc., co-founded during the first commercial internet wave to sell pharmaceutical marketing and medical education to physicians online. He was not the technologist in that partnership but the commercial one: his titles were Chief Strategic Officer and Executive Vice President of Sales, and the company grew on the strength of reaching a physician audience that pharmaceutical companies had previously only been able to reach through sales representatives. Medsite became one of the largest internet pharmaceutical marketing companies in the United States and was acquired by WebMD, which was consolidating consumer and professional health media at the time.

He founded Impelsys in New York in January 2001 — an unpromising moment to start a technology company, in the months when the dot-com collapse was still working through. The bet was narrower and more durable than the ones that had just failed. Rather than selling content directly, Impelsys built the production and delivery infrastructure that publishers needed as their catalogues moved from print to digital: conversion, digital asset management, platform hosting and distribution. That positioning made the company a supplier to the publishing industry rather than a competitor to it, and it put the delivery organisation in Bengaluru, where the specialised production labour for large-scale content conversion was available.

The inflection came in 2009 with iPublishCentral, which gave publishers a hosted digital content warehouse and a route to the emerging retail channels — Amazon and Barnes & Noble among them — without each publisher having to build integrations itself. It established Impelsys as a platform business rather than a services shop, and the iPublishCentral Suite went on to serve hundreds of publishers reaching libraries and learners worldwide.

The second strategic move was into healthcare. Impelsys launched the iPC Health platform in 2020, applying the same content-and-learning machinery to clinical education and hospital training. In 2021 that line was spun off and rebranded as MedLern, giving the healthcare business its own identity and go-to-market. In 2023 the company opened a medical device testing facility in Mangaluru, Karnataka, moving further into regulated work where validation and compliance evidence, not just delivery, is the product. Alongside this, the company has accumulated the assurance credentials that enterprise and healthcare buyers require — ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2022, a CMMI appraisal and GDPR compliance — and has been recognised by Brandon Hall, AWS and LearnX.

Outside the company, Shariff is a founding board member of The Heart & Stroke Foundation of India, the Indian affiliate of the American Heart Association, and is an active early-stage investor and mentor in the Indian start-up ecosystem. He is a distance runner who has completed the New York and Paris marathons, and his commentary on digital publishing has appeared in Forbes, India Today and Silicon India.

Education

Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Bachelor of Science, Economics with an Entrepreneurial Management concentration