What used to take months of bioinformatics analysis can now happen in minutes—and with greater biological insight than ever before. In this episode, Theral Timpson sits down with Vivek Adarsh, co-founder and CEO of Mithrl, an “AI science” company that’s bringing the power of vertical AI to the lab bench.
Adarsh began his career at Nvidia, long before the company became synonymous with AI. “What I learned there,” he recalls, “was that when you build a team around exceptional talent, deep passion, and empathy—especially empathy for your customers—everything else flows from that.” That lesson guides how Mithrl now builds tools for scientists drowning in data.
At the heart of Mithrl is a platform that takes scientists from raw data to biological insight in minutes, complete with automatic data cleaning, literature integration, and a conversational interface. Adarsh describes how one pharma team identified new biomarkers in 15 minutes—a process that would normally take months—and how another user avoided a costly error when Mithrl’s reasoning layer caught an incorrectly labeled sample.
Asked about the risk of losing “happy accidents” in a world of faster science, Adarsh pushed back:
“AI doesn’t eliminate the happy accident—it multiplies the opportunities for it. You can’t control luck, but you can create the conditions for it to appear more often.”
In closing, he offered a glimpse of what drives him:
“If we can accelerate the path from raw data to real discovery—from sequencing files to the next therapy—then we’ve done something far bigger than building software. We’ve built a partner for science itself.”
