The techpreneur of Indian descent is a Stanford University graduate with a master’s degree in management science and engineering in 2008. According to his LinkedIn page, two years before graduating Seth began his career as an engineer over at Google, where he worked for six years as part of its machine learning and mobile team, and co-founded Google’s user location platform. He then led the team to work on the Android location platform and what he humbly calls the “built the world’s most sophisticated cell/wifi based location technology”.

Early techpreneur

After Google, Seth founded an early tech start-up called Memry Labs in 2014. The app sees “new behaviours to record and remember more memories”, as quoted from his LinkedIn page. In simple terms, Seth built an app akin to journaling. Memry Labs was then acquired by Open Doors in 2017 and raised US$1.2 million. Seth stayed for another two years until 2019.

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He’s a dad on a mission

Seth is married to Jennifer Fernquist, who works as a staff user experience researcher at Google. In 2019, the couple welcomed a daughter named Lydia Niru Seth, who is born with a rare genetic mutation that causes severe mental and physical impairments. “We were told her disease was too rare, and there was no treatment, but neither is true,” Seth says on his Medium page. Seth tweeted last June that Lydia would be undergoing gene-silencing treatments and he will keep on fighting to give her – and children like her born with genetic mutations – a brighter future.

He’s passionate about advocating for more accessible genetic treatments

To push their mission forward, Seth and his wife launched Lydian Accelerator, a not-for-profit open-source platform that aims to create custom genetic treatments for children like Lydia. Thanks to months of researching academic papers and working alongside top scientists, the duo learned about Antisense Oligonucleotide (ASO) – a technology that can silence mutations of genetic diseases in their early stages, giving children like Lydia a better chance of recovery. The platform works by sharing and receiving databases with millions of others, in hope that together they can reduce lengthy lab work, time and the cost of the treatment. 

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He loves Bruce Springsteen

While scrolling through Seth’s Twitter timeline, it’s apparent that he is a massive Bruce Springsteen fan. From retweeting his best hits to his Vanity Fair cover, Seth also dressed up as his idol for Halloween. “I wasn’t born in the USA but sure was born to run. Going as Bruce Springsteen today,” he joked at the time on Twitter. 

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