Jon Stojan
Benjamin Arya
In the world of academia and innovation, few stories are as inspiring as that of Benjamin Arya. Initially setting his sights on curing cancer and extending human lifespan, Arya planned to combine his entrepreneurial pursuits with a career as a physician-scientist. Along the way, however, he would be inspired to take his ambitions in a different direction–one with more risk but also more potential. This decision would ultimately make all the difference.
Studying Toward a More Meaningful Future
Benjamin Arya had a great start on his dreams. Graduating in the top 0.05% of students in Australia, he earned the prestigious Chancellor’s Scholarship from the University of Melbourne and the Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship from the University of Sydney, both of the most prestigious academic awards available to Australian students. At Melbourne Medical School, Arya focused on medicine and biomedical research, but soon expanded his interests 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 period 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 Marchione’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 building startups. The first idea he had was a digital teaching assistant for faculty at universities and learning institutes. 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 frictionless solution: the disconnect between academic assessment and the real-world skills required by employers. It became Sindy Labs’ mission to solve this problem. Arya, along with co-founders Taha Ansari and Oliver Cucanic, set out to bridge this gap. Under his leadership, Sindy Labs built an enterprise software stack to help learning institutes become AI-enabled. Leveraging the latest advancements in LLMs, the company pioneered a new product category: conversational assessments.
“Sindy Labs built enterprise software to help university faculty engage, assess, micro-credential, and provide personalized feedback to their students, all while giving hiring managers transparency into their talent pipeline and a way to incentivize referrals from supernetworkers both within and external to the company,” Arya explains.
The startup’s innovative approach quickly gained traction, securing a coveted spot in Berkeley SkyDeck, one of the world’s most prestigious accelerator programs. With a 1% selection rate out of over 2,000 companies, this year’s SkyDeck batch was more selective than Y Combinator, The company was one of just 20 startups selected for the SkyDeck Fund’s substantial financing.
Today, Sindy Labs is a fully realized platform that helps create an employment pipeline for graduates and top talent. The system leverages AI to provide personalized feedback, micro-credentials for graduates, and soft skills assessments to give hiring managers, recruiters, and talent acquisition directors meaningful information about the skills, talents, and mastery that potential candidates 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 large institutions, including Arya’s former alma mater, the University of Melbourne, and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Sindy Labs Co-Founders: Benjamin Arya (CEO) and Oliver Cucanic (COO) are poised to revolutionize assessment and recruitment technology.
Progressing Toward Larger Goals
In the near term, Arya is working to bring Sindy Labs to more institutions, which is poised to benefit tens of thousands of students. “We have our sights set on making the platform fully audiovisual, leveraging rapid technological advancements in omni-multimodal LLM technology,” Arya shares.
He also wants to partner directly with major tech companies and financial services firms to change how they recruit talent and incentivize referrals within their company.
Beyond Sindy Labs, Arya is deeply invested in the convergence of synthetic biology, machine learning, genetic engineering, and in-silico protein design. He believes rapidly accelerating growth curves in these fields will usher in unprecedented breakthroughs in longevity and health, and plans to do his part to help these achievements take place. “In late 2022, I began experimenting with artificial neural networks for protein family classification. We demonstrated the feasibility of a simple artificial neural network model trained to predict protein superfamily from amino acid sequence data, achieving an average classification accuracy upwards of 98%,” Arya explains. He later realized that with large enough datasets, back-querying a trained protein classification model may inadvertently enable the ad hoc generation of novel artificial proteins to fulfill the user’s specifications. “Such a tool can be leveraged, for instance, to construct biologics that achieve the same physiological function and performance as patented ones, but with low enough amino acid sequence identity to fall outside of any intellectual property claims.”
He’s keeping track of cutting-edge developments across various industries, partly through a business and technology show he hosts.
The show, called Insane Ambition, features interviews with prominent figures in startups, research, and venture capital, and is a great place to start if you want to keep up with Arya and his progress.
“Our goal is to tell stories and break down lessons from people who have pushed the human race forward, or who are well on their way to doing so,” Arya says. Guests have included notable figures, including Joe Foster, founder of Reebok; Hong Weng Chong, founder of Cortical Labs; Andrew Nash, Chief Scientific Officer at CSL; and Prof. Eduard Hovy, AI professor at Carnegie Mellon.
You can learn what he sees and how he sees it, and meet people, who, like Arya, are working to build the future.