Tony Miranz

Co-Founder & President Machinify Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Tony Miranz co-founded Machinify in 2016 with Prasanna Ganesan and served as its president, responsible for business development and market strategy. The company applied machine learning to healthcare payment integrity — the problem of deciding, at the scale of hundreds of millions of claims, which ones a US health insurer should pay, question or recover. It is the second time Miranz has built a business around a change in how an industry moves value: he was the founding chief executive of Vudu, which delivered Hollywood films directly to televisions over the internet before the studios were ready for it, and which Walmart acquired in 2010. Before that he ran global sales at Openwave as mobile phones acquired web browsers. Machinify was acquired by New Mountain Capital in 2025 and merged into a much larger payment-integrity business that kept the name; Miranz does not appear in the combined company’s leadership.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Machinify in 2016 with Prasanna Ganesan and served as president, leading business development and market strategy.
• Founding chief executive of Vudu, which pioneered direct digital distribution of Hollywood films and was acquired by Walmart in February 2010, and later resold to Fandango and NBCUniversal in 2020.
• Led global sales at Openwave through the arrival of mobile web browsing and one of the period’s most successful technology IPOs.
• Chief operating officer of Poynt, the Silicon Valley payments and point-of-sale company.
• Holds 25 US technology patents.

Professional Journey

Miranz trained as an electrical engineer, with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois and a master’s from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and built his career on the commercial side of deeply technical products.

At Openwave — previously Phone.com — he led global sales during the period when mobile handsets first acquired browsers. Openwave’s microbrowser shipped on a large share of the world’s phones and the company’s IPO was among the most successful of its era. The work was carrier sales: long, technical, relationship-driven deals with the operators who controlled what appeared on a handset.

He then became founding chief executive of Vudu, started in 2005, which sold a set-top box that streamed and downloaded Hollywood films directly to a television. Vudu had to solve two problems at once — the engineering of delivering high-definition video over consumer broadband that was not really ready for it, and the licensing of studio content by a company the studios had no reason to trust. It succeeded at both, and is reasonably credited with opening the path that Netflix streaming, Hulu and Apple’s video services followed. Walmart acquired Vudu in February 2010; Walmart later sold it on to Fandango and NBCUniversal in 2020. His Vudu colleagues followed him: Prasanna Ganesan had been Vudu’s chief technology officer and Edward Lichty had run its business development and been its COO.

He served as chief operating officer of Poynt, the Silicon Valley payments company building smart point-of-sale terminals, before reuniting with Ganesan in 2016 to start Machinify.

Machinify’s premise was that healthcare payment integrity was a machine learning problem being solved with rules engines and human review. US insurers process claims at a volume where even small error rates represent enormous sums, and the incumbent approach — retrospective audit by specialists — was slow, expensive and adversarial. Machinify built AI applications to decide claims correctness prospectively. Miranz’s role was the commercial one he has always held: getting a technically credible product in front of large, conservative institutional buyers.

That model attracted private equity consolidation. In September 2024 New Mountain Capital merged The Rawlings Group, Apixio’s payment integrity business and VARIS into a single platform valued at around $3 billion, and on 10 January 2025 announced it would acquire Machinify and combine it with that platform, taking the Machinify name for the whole and a valuation of roughly $5 billion on more than $500 million of revenue. David Pierre leads the combined company as chief executive and Ganesan moved into product and technology leadership. Miranz is not named in the announcement or on the combined company’s leadership page, and what he is doing now is not established by any source available.

Education

University of Illinois

BS, Electrical Engineering

Illinois Institute of Technology

MS, Electrical Engineering