Shapiro+Raj Launches an AI Agent Built Specifically for the Life Sciences Industry, Appoints Scott Swigart and Amir Kapadia to Lead Its Growth

CHICAGO, April 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Shapiro+Raj, a leading life sciences strategic insights consultancy, today announced that Stella.ai, its proprietary AI Agent built for life sciences marketing and insights, is now available as a direct offering to help life sciences teams get the insights that accelerate molecules to market. The firm also named Scott Swigart as Chief Product Officer and Amir Kapadia as President to lead Stella's expansion.

Speed has become the key commercial reality. With exploding pipelines, reshaped expectations, collapsing commercial windows, and huge product proliferation. The biggest enemy for life sciences brands now is time. Stella has been purpose-built to address this need.

"Pharma commercialization is accelerating faster than the evidence systems built to support it," said Zain Raj, Chairman and CEO of Shapiro+Raj. "Insights teams can no longer work from primary research alone. They need to connect data from the entire ecosystem including the internal knowledge their organizations have accumulated over years. Stella brings all of it together into a single living, breathing asset that teams can interrogate on demand. It does not sit in a deck. It does not wait for the next study. It answers the question you have right now, with the transparency and rigor that high-stakes decisions require. That is the pace commercialization now demands. Scott built it. Amir has seen what it does for clients. That combination is what scaling Stella actually requires."

Scott Swigart, Chief Product Officer

With more than 20 years in the market research industry, he brings a rare combination of technical depth to architect a purpose-built AI platform and the researcher's instinct for what insights teams actually need from one. As SVP of Technology at Shapiro+Raj, Swigart engineered Stella around a core conviction: AI in market research must be transparent and honest, not a black box that generates plausible-sounding answers from opaque logic. A frequent speaker on responsible AI in life sciences, he brings a builder's point of view that give clients confidence in every output Stella produces.

Amir Kapadia, President

Amir Kapadia brings more than a decade of operating experience, along with an intimate understanding of how research teams actually use Stella in practice. As COO of Shapiro+Raj, Amir has worked at the intersection of client delivery, operational scale, and AI capability, giving him a clear-eyed view of where Stella creates the most value and what it takes to bring that value to a broader market. Kapadia will lead Stella's expansion as a direct offering for pharma insights teams, with particular focus on mid-size and emerging companies that need enterprise-grade intelligence without enterprise-scale research budgets.

"Insights and marketing teams are under tremendous pressure to get better answers faster. They have access to a lot of the data but most of it is still effectively out of reach," said Kapadia. "Stella gives teams the ability to interrogate a wide variety of data in real time, on demand, without commissioning a new study every time a new question arises. It's fundamentally a very different way of doing this work. Scott built something that makes that possible, and we're just getting started."

About Shapiro+Raj

Shapiro+Raj is a new agency for the AI-amplified Insights Economy™. The firm brings deep human behavioral science expertise together with purpose-built AI to help pharma and biotech companies accelerate their molecules to market.

SOURCE SHAPIRO+RAJ