Shara Balakrishnan, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and CTO at Mithrl, an AI-powered platform automating the next-generation sequencing (NGS) data lifecycle to accelerate scientific discovery for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

Shara earned a dual degree (B.Tech and M.Tech) in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Intelligent Manufacturing from IIT Madras, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Santa Barbara, where his research focused on system identification and control in synthetic biology.

A scientist-turned-entrepreneur, Shara brings a rare interdisciplinary perspective spanning control systems, machine learning, and synthetic biology, enabling him to architect AI solutions that bridge the gap between wet lab experimentation and computational data analysis.

At Mithrl, Shara co-leads the technical vision alongside CEO Vivek Adarsh, building an agentic AI platform that enables scientists to process and analyze complex genomic data in minutes without requiring coding or bioinformatics expertise, serving clients across biotech, pharma, and healthcare.

Mithrl raised a $4M seed round led by Bonfire Ventures in November 2024, with a post-money valuation of $15.92M, and its platform is projected to save companies up to $100,000 per month in operational overhead by reducing the need for large teams of specialized experts.