Our Team
Learn more about our founding team and new career opportunities at Merlyn AI.
Hema Srinivasan
Co-Founder & CEO
Hema Srinivasan is an expert in analyzing and shaping health markets to improve patient access and generate commercial value. She co-founded Merlyn AI in 2025 to solve the market intelligence gaps she has battled throughout her career.
Prior to founding Merlyn AI, Hema founded Crowdcure, a startup aiming to improve care for the 190M women suffering from endometriosis. She was also Principal Consultant at Hema & Associates, an advisory services company specializing in market shaping, innovative financing, and artificial intelligence.
Previously, Hema was Chief Access Officer at MedAccess, where she built and led a team of experts to envision and implement innovative financing partnerships with the aim of expanding access to health products and services in underserved communities. During her tenure at MedAccess, Hema and her team negotiated eight financial guarantees that have supported over $300M of health product procurement and reached over 400M people in 95 countries to-date.
Prior to joining MedAccess, Hema worked at Gilead Sciences as Senior Director for South Asia. In this capacity, Hema led Gilead’s business across the region and developed strategies to increase access to medicines for HIV, viral hepatitis, and invasive fungal infections.
Hema also served as Associate Director of Global Markets at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, where she helped to secure access agreements for long-acting contraceptives, HIV drugs and diagnostics, and maternal health products, generating over $500M in projected savings for purchasers.
Hema started her career in Global Investment Research covering the Biotechnology and Healthcare Services sectors at Goldman Sachs and at Morgan Stanley.
She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Economics and Psychology. Hema's current and prior expert advisory appointments include the Medicines Patent Pool Expert Advisory Group, the Access to Medicines Index Expert Review Committee, the Gates Foundation’s META Market Shaping Advisory Council, USAID’s HIV Prevention Product Access Advisory Committee, and the UN Commision on Life-Saving Commodities for Women and Children.
Syamala Srinivasan
Co-Founder & Chief Data Scientist
Syamala Srinivasan is a recognized expert in AI and Machine Learning. The data science architecture behind Merlyn's simulation engine is her life's work applied to the problems that matter most.
Syamala Srinivasan has been a faculty of the Data Science program at Northwestern University since 2013. She teaches courses in Deep Learning, NLP, Machine Learning and Modeling.
She has over 35 years of industrial and academic experience in data science.
Previously, Syamala was the Chief Analytics Officer at Tada Cognitive Solutions. She integrated AI/ML business solutions into the Tada platform. She also worked for the US Army in predictive maintenance of ground vehicles.
Earlier in her career, Syamala spent 22 years at Caterpillar Inc. in various technical and management positions. She started the Department of Analytics and was the director of analytics before retiring. She focused on developing and deploying analytical solutions to complex business problems across the entire value chain of product development, manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, sales, and human resources. She developed innovative techniques to solve complex business problems and received two U.S. patents.
One of Syamala's patents was used to spin off a new company called Akoya. It was one of the first data science companies in the world. Akoya was ultimately acquired by Birla Technologies, Inc.
Syamala has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Statistics from Colorado State University. She also received a M.S. and a B.S in Mathematics from India. Her prior academic appointments include National Louis University, Bradley University, Chicago State University, Northern Illinois University, and Colorado State University.
