Podcast/Video Interviews by Stephen Ibaraki

A Chat with Eswar Iyer: biotech founder and deep-tech innovator building large-scale, data-driven systems at the intersection of synthetic biology, protein engineering, and AI-driven drug discovery; CEO and co-founder of Ai

This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Eswar Iyer.

Eswar Iyer is CEO and co-founder of Aikium, where he builds AI-driven synthetic biology platforms aimed at hard-to-drug protein targets. His work focuses on generating ultra-large, ML-trainable experimental datasets that link wet-lab biology directly to AI models for therapeutic discovery.

Previously at 10x Genomics, Eswar was part of the core technical team behind Visium, Visium HD, and Xenium, and contributed to platform architectures that scaled from early R&D into widely adopted commercial products. He is a named inventor on over 100 patents across spatial and single-cell genomics, protein engineering, and large-scale biological read-write systems, and has provided technical diligence support on strategic acquisitions totaling $480M.

Trained at Harvard Medical School under Professor George Church, Eswar works at the intersection of molecular biology, data systems, and productization, with a focus on translating complex science into scalable platforms that can be deployed in real drug-development settings.