AUM BioTech

An AI-native biotech, helping scientists understand the causes of disease.

INNOVATIONS

OF THE WORLD

As Featured In:

INNOVATE® Philadelphia

As Featured In:

INNOVATE® Philadelphia

DESIGNED IN PHILADELPHIA. MADE IN USA. SHIPPED WORLDWIDE.

Founded in Philadelphia in 2015 by an immigrant biomedical researcher, AUM BioTech now designs the precision compounds that scientists in nearly forty countries use to study how genes function, and understand what goes wrong in disease.

In 2009, Veenu Aishwarya arrived in Philadelphia from India to train as a scientistat the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Seventeen years later, his Philadelphia-based company, an AI-native biotech by his design, makes the precision compounds that biomedical researchers in nearly forty countries use to study how genes function, and understand what goes wrong in disease. He built that company without raising a dollar of venture capital. As the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed a couple of miles from his current office, AUM BioTech’s quiet, patient work belongs to that longer Philadelphia story.

AN AMERICAN STORY

AUM BioTech was founded in 2015 and located inside the University City Science Center’s Port incubator, just blocks from the Penn campus where Aishwarya had trained. By then, he had spent almost ten years studying the biology of RNA silencing, the mechanism that would become his life’s work. The company began with a simple question: could the molecules that switch off genes in the laboratory be made easier for any scientist anywhere to use, so they could study how genes function and what causes disease?

It started with one scientist, one customer. Today AUM BioTech’s compounds are in laboratories in nearly forty countries on five continents, and the company runs from CIC Labs + Innovation Campus at 3675 Market Street, in the same University City neighborhood where it began.

On a shelf in his office sits a Tamra Patra, a copper plaque awarded in 1972 by the Government of India to a man who had spent time in prison in Meerut at age twenty-seven, fighting against British colonial rule. That man was Aishwarya’s grandfather, born in 1904. The empire he fought was the same one that, a century and a half earlier, the founders of American independence had broken from, in the very city where his grandson would one day build a company. India became independent in 1947. Seventy-four years later, in 2021, his grandson became a naturalized U.S. citizen, while navigating the U.S. immigration system and building his company, AUM BioTech, with the goal of finding cures for disease.

Aishwarya speaks often about his father, who dedicated his life to public service in his community. The same impulse, he says, now runs through his own work: to serve the global scientific community in its search for cures. The willingness to take the harder road, to do honest work over many years, to refuse to quit, to journey from one independence to another, none of this began with the founder. It is an inheritance.

THE AUMsilence PLATFORM

AUM BioTech’s flagship is the AUM silence platform, a system for designing compounds that can switch off any gene inside a living cell or an animal model, in a single step. There is no virus to engineer. There is no specialized delivery vehicle. There is no complicated protocol. The compound enters the cell and does its work.

That single property has opened doors to cell types that were once notoriously hard to study. The immune cells that fight cancer. The neurons that fail in Alzheimer’s. The stem cells used in regenerative medicine. The cardiac muscle cells whose dysfunction causes heart failure. Until recently, getting these molecules into cells like these was either impossible or so expensive that only the largest laboratories could attempt it. AUM BioTech is on a mission to change that.

“Most diseases have a genetic component. Our work is to design and develop the compounds that scientists use to find those genes, study their function by switching them off, and learn what they do. We do this from an office on Market Street, a couple of miles from where Independence was signed. America at 250, and Philadelphia at 250, is still the place where this kind of work, and this kind of arrival, is possible.”
– Veenu Aishwarya, Founder and CEO, AUM BioTech –

The validation has come from the research laboratories themselves. AUM BioTech’s compounds have been used in more than one hundred peer-reviewed studies, in journals including Nature, Science, Cell Stem Cell, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Circulation. The biomedical researchers behind those papers work at research universities, cancer centers, federally funded laboratories, and pharmaceutical and biotech companies of all sizes. AUM BioTech’s goal is not just to serve the largest laboratories, but to make the work accessible to every researcher, so that more of them can advance the science and find cures for disease, faster.

AN AI-NATIVE BIOTECH COMPANY

AUM BioTech is, by Aishwarya’s design, an AI-native biotechnology company. Aishwarya has woven artificial intelligence through every stage of how compounds are designed, manufactured, validated, and delivered to the scientists who use them.

The AUMsilence platform itself has been transformed by machine learning. Aishwarya, who taught himself the fundamentals of artificial intelligence, built and trained systems that analyze hundreds of billions of data points drawn from genomes, scientific publications, and the company’s own decade of laboratory results. The platform now uses these models, alongside large language models, to design precision compounds in hours instead of weeks. Every compound AUM BioTech ships is the product of computational analysis, intelligent design, and, most importantly, the human judgment of the scientists who refine it.

That same intelligence extends to the company’s broader operations. Logistics, scheduling, and customer engagement are managed by agentic AI systems built on Salesforce. The result is a small Philadelphia team that operates with the speed and reach of a much larger one. AI does not replace the science. It accelerates it, so that biomedical researchers around the world can move faster on the questions that matter most: which genes cause which diseases, and what can be done about them.

IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY

Five or six times a year, the AUM BioTech team travels to major scientific conferences in cities across the United States and abroad. They build the booth themselves and work it through long conference days. Thousands of biomedical researchers stop by to talk about their work, ask questions about the AUMsilence platform, and explore collaborations. Many of AUMBioTech’s most enduring customer relationships have begun in conversations like these.

For Aishwarya, these conversations are not just business. Good science, he believes, is a community endeavor. The right tools in the right hands can change what is possible. And no laboratory anywhere should be locked out of the work because of geography, budget, or access. The AUM BioTech booth at each conference is, in effect, a small piece of Philadelphia traveling out into the world.

OPEN SCIENCE

AUM BioTech has also given part of its work away. The company built and now offers, free of charge, a public research portal that any scientist anywhere in the world can use to analyze the structure of proteins, the patterns of gene expression across human tissues, the networks that govern how cells behave, the pathways through which cells respond to disease, and the clinical significance of genetic variants. Six of the world’s leading genomic databases now sit in a single workspace, alongside tools the company built to help researchers see their target genes in detail.

The portal is free, and the company built it itself. The reasoning is simple: the work of finding cures for disease is large enough to share.

AT HOME

The work has been recognized at home, too. The Philadelphia Business Journal has honored Aishwarya six times in the years since he arrived in the city, naming him a Healthcare Innovator, a 40 Under 40 honoree, and a Diversity Leader in Business, among other recognitions. He likes to say the honors belong to the team, and to the city that made the work possible.

DISCIPLINE

Behind every number in this story is the question every founder eventually asks: how do you keep going? Aishwarya has an answer most chief executives do not.

For six straight years, almost every morning before the day begins, he has shown up at the same University City Orange Theory Fitness studio in Philadelphia, and at other studios across the U.S. and around the world when he travels. He keeps the routine wherever he is. He has now passed 2,100 classes, an average of nearly seven workouts a week. He talks about it openly because he wants other founders, especially immigrants and first-generation entrepreneurs, to understand something he has lived. “Discipline creates momentum,” he says.“ And momentum creates results.”

He is also a vocal advocate for mental health. Progress, he likes to point out, rarely comes from dramatic moments. It comes from showing up, especially on the days you do not want to.

AT 250

In 2026, the United States turns 250. Philadelphia signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, in a square mile not far from where Aishwarya started his American life in 2009 and now runs his company. From that same square mile, AUM BioTech’s compounds now help biomedical researchers in nearly forty countries study how genes function, and understand what goes wrong in cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, heart disease, and diabetes.

Philadelphia is where America began. It is where a young immigrant scientist arrived with an idea, and where, two and a half centuries on, that idea is becoming the daily work of a small but highly motivated and dedicated team helping biomedical researchers around the world find the cures for diseases that every family is waiting for.

Philadelphia, again, at the epicenter. The story is not finished. “We are still showing up.”

BY THE NUMBERS