Ajay Shah once borrowed a laboratory centrifuge to help a mixologist separate milk proteins for a cocktail. It is a pleasing use of an engineering education: a piece of equipment accustomed to serious work gets invited to drinks. The anecdote belongs to Shah’s own account of the conversations he enjoys. He also mentions going deep into freight-shipping logistics with a UPS pilot. Apparently, there is more than one way to get a founder talking.
These are small details in a career with some fairly large numbers. Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Cytovale, which began in 2013. Its later funding announcements included $84 million in November 2023 and $100 million in October 2024. A professional biography could hurry from one sum to the next. But the cocktail is worth keeping. It lets a little air into the room.
A person’s curiosity is easier to understand when it has an object. Here, the object is somebody else’s craft. You can hear the difference between wanting to collect an impressive contact and wanting to know how a job works. Shah’s examples concern the mechanics of things: separating ingredients, moving freight, understanding a process well enough to ask a better question.
The centrifuge has left the lab
A cocktail and an aircraft’s cargo schedule make an unlikely pair of teaching materials. They sit far enough apart to suggest that the attraction is the conversation itself. Both involve practitioners who know details an outsider might overlook. That is where an engineer can have a rather good time. A seemingly simple result usually has a complicated set of decisions behind it.
There is humour in the borrowed machine, too. A centrifuge is an extravagant contribution to a drink, at least by the standards of people whose kitchen equipment ends at a blender. Yet Shah’s telling is about engaging with someone who takes a craft seriously. Curiosity can be practical without being solemn. Even an experiment with a glass at the end still asks how something works.
The same interest gives this founder’s story a useful opening. Before the balance sheet, before the job title, there is a willingness to let another person explain. A conversation has to leave enough room for that. Expertise is generous company when its visitor arrives with questions. It becomes much less generous when the visitor has already composed the answer.
Engineering, with room for another subject
Shah graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 2006. His undergraduate record combines engineering with legal studies. He then earned a master’s in mechanical engineering at MIT and completed doctoral training through the joint Harvard-MIT program. The route took him through institutions where a question has to survive close examination. A promising idea gets more interesting when someone asks you to demonstrate it.
The legal-studies detail is a welcome interruption in an otherwise technical sequence. Engineering and law attend to different sorts of constraints. One asks whether a design will work; the other examines the rules under which people act. A company eventually encounters both. It is an attractive pairing for a résumé, though no course catalogue can supply a complete rehearsal for being responsible for a business.
Before Cytovale, Shah had already co-founded two companies. One was acquired in 2012. That places entrepreneurship alongside his early technical career rather than at a distant point after it. By the time Cytovale began, the work of making a company had already entered his life. The new venture arrived with collaborators, a research background and some previous experience of turning an idea into an organisation.
A company is a collective noun
Cytovale’s founding group includes Shah, Henry Tse and Dino Di Carlo. Tse is now chief technology officer; Di Carlo is a co-founder and scientific advisor. Shah leads the company as CEO. Those distinctions matter. The phrase “founder story” can make a collaborative enterprise sound like a solo performance. Three names make the beginning a little more accurately crowded.
An early UCLA company profile already placed Shah on the commercial side of the undertaking. It described him as driving commercialisation while identifying the people responsible for the underlying research and technology. That division of work is less theatrical than the familiar picture of one inventor doing everything. It is also easier to imagine continuing for thirteen years.
As an organisation grows, its work acquires more names. Cytovale’s current leadership includes dedicated responsibilities for finance, operations, people and marketing. A founder may understand the original idea intimately while relying on colleagues to understand whole parts of the business more deeply. That arrangement requires a particular kind of confidence: enough knowledge to ask questions, enough room to hear the answers.
The company’s operations remit now spans engineering and production, supply chain, software, data, service and support. These are the kinds of nouns a funding headline tends to leave out. They describe the work that lets an organisation keep its promises on an ordinary Tuesday. A prototype has a relatively small audience. A growing business has colleagues, partners and customers whose Tuesdays all need to work.
The years between the cheques
In November 2023, Cytovale announced an $84 million Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners, with Sands Capital among the new investors. The following October, Sands led the $100 million Series D. CPP Investments joined that round, alongside existing backers. The two announcements belong to the company’s commercial expansion, a later stage of a venture that had started a decade earlier.
Announced round sizes. Company capital, not revenue or personal wealth.
A sum gives a reader something definite to hold. It has digits, a date, a lead investor. The intervening years are harder to compress. They contain the repeated work of building the business before a later announcement can be made. Thirteen years at one company is a different sort of measure. It asks you to imagine duration rather than just scale.
A funding round also changes the questions a company can afford to address. Plans gain resources. Resources bring decisions about timing, hiring and responsibility. The press release records a moment; the organisation has to live through everything that follows. The cheque may be large, but it has no useful opinion about which task should be done on Monday morning.
Shah’s comments about investors emphasise alignment and relationships developed over time. His public testimonial for Dolby Family Ventures credits the firm with helping Cytovale early on. The point is personal as well as financial. An investor becomes part of a continuing conversation about the company. That makes choosing whom to work with a decision whose consequences last beyond the announcement.
Success brings a new syllabus
In a 2024 interview, Shah described Cytovale’s first decade as a succession of roughly two-year chapters. He discussed setting a milestone for the current stage while meeting people who could help him understand the coming one. It is a useful way of thinking about time. The present still needs attention, but the next responsibility is already approaching.
“If I succeed here, then what?”Ajay Shah
The question makes success slightly inconvenient, which is probably healthy for a business plan. Reaching a milestone can create work you have not done before. The reward for solving one problem may be a larger team, more obligations or a different set of decisions. A title can remain unchanged while the daily job under it becomes unfamiliar.
For a technically trained founder, learning to lead introduces a new setting for familiar habits. There are still observations to make and assumptions to examine. But advice arrives from people with different experiences, and a decision may involve several competing considerations. A useful answer has to fit the organisation as it exists. Borrowing another founder’s conclusion is easier than understanding whether it belongs in your own company.
That is the appeal of the chapter idea. It permits a founder to be experienced and still require instruction. Years in a role do not eliminate the possibility that tomorrow’s work needs a different conversation. The person who helped with the last decision might help again. Someone else might see the next problem more clearly. Learning can be an ordinary part of the job.
Twenty years after graduation
In 2026, Harvey Mudd named Shah among its Outstanding Alumni Award recipients. Twenty years separate that recognition from his graduation. An alumni award folds a long span into a short line on a list. Behind the line are further study, earlier ventures and the company he has led since 2013. The former student has supplied the college with another story.
There is a pleasing circularity to the moment. A college teaches people to approach difficult work; its graduates eventually return with accounts of what happened when they tried. Shah’s account leaves room for conversation and experiment. He advises curiosity and openness, and speaks about learning from people who are skilled at their own work. The advice has a centrifuge attached.
That final detail keeps the portrait human. The CEO has funding rounds to discuss and a company to run. He also has questions about drinks and freight. A professional life can make space for interests that have no place in a quarterly presentation. Sometimes those interests sharpen the work. Sometimes they simply make the conversation better. Either seems a good reason to keep asking.