Los Angeles, CA, June 23, 2026 – Founder and CEO Sundar Ramayya and President Sulekha Ramayya of EvolveNXT were named EY US Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2026 Greater Los Angeles Award winners.

Founded in 2011 and based in Torrance, California, EvolveNXT builds modern, enterprise-grade software that insurance carriers use to manage their distribution networks across Health, Life and Property & Casualty lines. Its platform spans producer onboarding and contracting, incentive compensation, web enrollment, a producer portal and lead management, helping carriers onboard agents, keep them ready to sell and compensate them accurately and on time. Today, carriers and health plans in all 50 states rely on EvolveNXT to run distribution across all lines of insurance business.

Sundar Ramayya co-founded EvolveNXT in 2011 and serves as Chief Executive Officer, leading the Company’s product direction and growth. Sulekha Ramayya, President, leads the company’s operations and delivery. Under their leadership, EvolveNXT has grown from a focused idea into a platform insurance organizations rely on to bring greater efficiency, accuracy, and strategic value to a critical business function.

“We started EvolveNXT to take on a problem most people overlook: making sure the agents who sell insurance are onboarded correctly and paid accurately, at scale,” said Sundar Ramayya, Founder and CEO of EvolveNXT. “Fifteen years later, carriers in all 50 states run that work on our platform. This recognition belongs to the customers who trusted us with something that has no room for failure, and to our team of Evolvers that builds it.”

“While we leverage our experience in the distribution performance management space, we are not shy about evolving our platform to continue being at the forefront of technology in the insurance sector,” said Sulekha Ramayya, President of EvolveNXT. “This is a tremendous honor.”

Now in its 41st year, the Entrepreneur Of The Year program honors business leaders for their ingenuity, courage and entrepreneurial spirit. It celebrates original founders who bootstrapped their business from inception or raised outside capital to grow their company, transformational CEOs who infused innovation into an existing organization to catapult its trajectory and multigenerational family business leaders who reimagined a legacy business model to strengthen it for the future.

Winners were chosen by an independent panel of past winners, top CEOs and business leaders. Judges assessed candidates on long-term value creation, entrepreneurial spirit, purpose-driven commitment, and significant growth and impact.

As Greater Los Angeles award winners, Sundar Ramayya and Sulekha Ramayya will now be considered by the national judges for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 National Awards, which will be presented in November at the annual Strategic Growth Forum®, where high-growth CEOs, Fortune 1000 executives and investors converge to shape the future of business.

The Entrepreneur Of The Year program has recognized the leadership of entrepreneurs such as:

- Jason McGowan, Crumbl Cookies
- Reid Hoffman | Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn Corp.
- Saeju Jeong, Noom
- Howard Schultz, Starbucks Coffee Company
- Holly Thaggard | Amanda Baldwin, Supergoop!

Sponsors

Founded and produced by Ernst & Young LLP, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards include presenting sponsors PNC Bank, Cresa, Marsh Risk, SAP and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In Greater Los Angeles, sponsors also include ADP, Cooley, Vaco, Big Picture, Los Angeles Business Journal, and Alston & Bird.  

About Entrepreneur Of The Year

Founded in 1986, Entrepreneur Of The Year® has celebrated more than 11,000 ambitious visionaries who are leading successful, dynamic businesses in the US, and it has since expanded to nearly 60 countries and territories globally.

The US program consists of 17 regional programs whose panels of independent judges select the regional award winners every June. Those winners compete for national recognition at the Strategic Growth Forum® in November where national finalists and award winners are announced. The national overall winner represents the US at the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™ competition. Visit ey.com/us/eoy.