Inventing the Future: Benjamin Arya’s Journey from Medical School to Technology Entrepreneurship

Future-forward ambitions can be incredible to hear. One student at Melbourne Medical School set himself the goals of curing cancer and extending human lifespan. His plan to study toward these achievements while serving as a physician-scientist seemed achievable. Along the way, however, he would be inspired to take his ambitions in a different direction, one with more risk but more potential, and this decision would make all the difference.

Studying Toward a More Meaningful Future

Benjamin Arya

had a great start on his dreams. He graduated in the top 0.05% of students in Australia, earning the University of Melbourne’s Chancellor’s Scholarship, one of the most prestigious academic awards available to Australian students. At Melbourne Medical School, Arya focused on medicine and expanded his interest into diverse fields like computer science, neuroscience, and machine learning. Arya knew he needed as much varied, specialized knowledge as possible to achieve his goals and was willing to do the work.

It was during this time that Arya met a law student-turned-entrepreneur named Max Marchione, who was already building up multiple companies. “The courage he had to leave law school to pursue high-risk ventures was captivating for me,” says Arya, who was invited to join Machione’s exclusive club for talented young founders and investors.

Exposure to the dynamic, energetic world of entrepreneurship changed Arya, letting him see new ways he might achieve his old ambitions. “It became hard to stay in medical school without giving my entrepreneurial ideas a go,” says Arya, who soon turned his attention to innovative startups. The first idea he had was a university-level digital teaching assistant. This idea would eventually become the impetus for Sindy Labs to be founded.

Founding Ideas That Make a Difference

Approaching the abstract idea of a digital teaching assistant, Arya became aware of a real problem that needed a real solution: the disconnect between academic assessment and the real-world skills required by employers. It became Sindy Labs’ mission to solve this problem.

“In March of 2023, we entered the University of Melbourne StartUp Pitch Competition with a groundbreaking idea for assessment tooling that cannot be gamed. By June, we had built an early prototype and brought on globally-renowned AI expert Prof Eduard Hovy as an advisor,” Arya notes.

It was then time to secure the funding of Berkeley SkyDeck, one of the world’s most prestigious accelerator programs. Sindy Labs was among only 20 startups selected out of over 2,000 companies for SkyDeck’s substantial financing.

Today, Sindy Labs is a fully realized platform that helps create an employment pipeline for graduates. The system leverages AI to provide personalized feedback for students, micro-credentials, and their skills to give hiring managers meaningful information about the skills, talents, and mastery that students possess. The platform’s primary benefits are twofold: it helps businesses make better hiring decisions and enables the graduates of top universities to find employment that suits their skill sets more quickly.

Within a year of its founding, Sindy Labs had grown from its two-person founding partnership to a sixteen-person team and secured pilot programs at institutions, including his former home at the University of Melbourne.

Progressing Toward Larger Goals

In the near term, Arya is working to bring Sindy Labs to more universities, which can benefit tens of thousands of students. He wants to partner directly with major tech companies to change how they recruit graduate talent. But Sindy Labs is only a part of Arya’s larger goals.

He believes that converging trends in synthetic biology, machine learning, quantum computing, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology will lead to unprecedented breakthroughs in longevity and human health, and he plans to do his part to help these achievements take place. He’s keeping track of cutting-edge developments across various industries, partly through a business and technology show he hosts.

The talk show is a great place to start if you want to keep up with Arya and his progress. On this show, called Insane Ambition, he interviews prominent figures in startups and investment. You can learn what he sees and how he sees it and meet the people who–like Arya–are working to build the future.

Shannon Sparks, Special to California Business Journal