A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and CEO, Ayasdi...
Gurjeet Singh was an engineer working for Texas Instruments in Bangalore, India with a nagging fear that he was not as knowledgeable about math as he should be. "I lived in fear that other engineers would stop me in the street and ask me a math question and I wouldn't know the answer," says the soft spoken and humble Singh.
He would later use that fear as motivation to propel him to Stanford's Advanced Mathematics graduate program, a partnership with one of the world's most innovative mathematicians and ultimately to co-found and lead a company called Ayasdi that is leading a technology movement that emphasizes the importance of extracting insight from data, not just organizing and storing it.
It also isn't every day that the former head of Walt Disney, Michael Ovitz, shows up at your front door, check in hand, asking to invest in your early stage start up. But, that’s exactly what happened to Gurjeet Singh in early 2012. Ovitz had learned that Gurjeet and two other math Ph.Ds from Stanford were on the verge of changing the way the world uses complex data to solve its most pressing problems. In fact, before Ovitz had showed up at Gurjeet’s door, Gurjeet and his co-founders had already made a significant breakthrough in breast cancer research.
The company has raised nearly $45 million from investors who share Ovitz' enthusiasm, such as Khosla Ventures,GE Venture, Citi Ventures, IVP and Floodgate.
Ayasdi (which means "to seek" in Cherokee) was founded on the premise that 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years alone, yet only 1% of that data has been analyzed. "Analyzing the remaining 99% represents the next frontier for humanity," says Singh. According to Singh, the world is awash in data. The data that lie within gene sequences, sensor data, customer records, and electronic medical files may indeed offer up the secrets to curing cancer, enabling retailers to engage more meaningfully with customers, keeping machines running constantly and creating better outcomes for patients and hospitals alike.
Today the company is growing fast with more than 80 employees and blue- chip clients from the likes of GE, Merck, Citigroup, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Mount Sinai Hospital.
This all started in 2005 when Gurjeet had left his native India to conquer his "fear of not knowing enough math" for the United States to pursue an academic career in mathematics. He gained admittance to the Ph.D program at Stanford, where he would become the mentee of professor, Gunnar Carlsson. Gurjeet earned his Ph.D from Stanford in Computational Mathematics after finishing his dissertation in just three short months. The time between his Master’s Degree and his Ph.D was 18 months, a record that still stands in the Mathematics Department of Stanford.
During this period, Gunnar was becoming world-renowned for his ground breaking research in Topological Data Analysis (TDA). TDA is an applied form of topology, the field of mathematics that studies shape. In that same year, 2005, Gunnar received a grant from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to further his research.
At the outset of the DARPA funding, Gunnar was in the process of recruiting graduate students to work on the project. According to Gunnar, Gurjeet was so clearly outstanding that he quickly became a collaborator rather than just a graduate student. By 2008, Gunnar, Gurjeet and a third collaborator, Harlan Sexton, felt that certain parts of their research should be made more generally useful, and decided to form a company in that year.
Gurjeet had immediately grasped the importance and expansive nature of Topological Data Analysis. In only a few years, Gurjeet secured the funding noted above and had charted a path that would allow Ayasdi to commercialize the group’s ground-breaking technology.
As the CEO of Ayasdi, Gurjeet is leading a mission-driven organization whose technology has application across any industry or problem that deals with complexity. The growth of data has been well documented, however, the growth of complexity has not, and is exponentially more difficult to contend with for human beings. Gurjeet’s vision is to have Ayasdi’s software decipher the hidden patterns in data that result in fundamental improvements in the human condition.
And it’s working.
One of Gurjeet’s first initiatives was to advance academic and non-profit collaboration to address world health. Some of Ayasdi’s noted collaborators include the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Mount Sinai Hospital, U-BIOPRED, Harvest Choice (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), The Michael J Fox Foundation, MIT and Harvard Medical School.
One scientific breakthrough that resulted was the discovery of Traumatic Brain Injury patient sub populations with specific complicating factors. Current labels of mild, moderate, and severe head injury were too simplistic, but the data produced by new imaging technologies, coupled with clinical and genomic records, proved too complex for doctors and researchers to decipher. Using Ayasdi’s software, UCSF researchers were able to determine what types of injuries would result in what types of complicating factors – including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The work is so promising that Ayasdi and UCSF were presented the GE/NFL “Head Health” award to explore how to better diagnose and treat mild traumatic brain injuries in professional football players.
A second collaboration with far-reaching implications for millions of Americans is the work that Mt. Sinai is doing using Ayasdi software. Mt. Sinai has developed entirely new patient stratifications for Type II Diabetes patients. Researchers were able to combine disparate sets of patient data in the Ayasdi software to discover not just one but six distinct sub-types of Type II Diabetes patients. This information is helping physicians develop more targeted treatments for patients with different subsets of the disease, and is changing the way we think about patient care by moving towards a more personalized medicine model.
The ability to support the philanthropic side of Ayasdi’s mission depends on the success of its enterprise software business. Here, Gurjeet has made the transition from graduate student to CEO seamlessly. Under his leadership, the company has secured dozens of customers across the healthcare, financial services, energy and technology industries, including Merck, Citigroup, General Electric, Texas Medical Center, Lawrence Livermore Lab, and oil and gas exploration company, Anadarko.
Gurjeet believes firmly that within the next decade that the vast majority of information will be generated by machines, consumed by machines and interpreted by machines – creating autonomous systems spanning virtually everything we do.
"The ascendance of artificial intelligence, however, will not destroy more jobs than they create over the next generation, rather, the emerging robot class will free mankind to engage on a new class of complex and pressing problems," says Singh. "There will, of course, be economic dislocation. Further, there will profound societal implications sparked in part by technical skills and in part by the speed by which the world will change," continues Singh.
Singh believes that the inherently human capabilities of creativity, critical thinking, emotion will be unleashed on a series of problems that were previously beyond the reach of mankind and will dramatically enhance the lives of coming generations.
Ayasdi is the highlight in Gurjeet’s career to date as he co-founded the company in 2008, when he was just 27 years old. "For me, the most exciting aspect of my success is how the insights that Ayasdi’s technology has found in data can truly impact people’s lives," says Singh.
Ayasdi is helping the world's biggest and most sophisticated organizations discover breakthroughs that will change how we all live and work. Over the last few months, major financial institutions like Citibank have found previously unknown patterns in many diverse data sets including macroeconomic analysis of risk. Research hospitals (Mt. Sinai and UCSF) and pharmaceutical companies have uncovered new insights around not only traumatic brain injury and diabetes but schizophrenia, and autism.
"My mission is to bring the power of big data insights and analytics to every company," concludes Singh.
