A company can employ a chemist and a programmer and still spend a surprising amount of time translating. The experiment means one thing in the laboratory, another in a spreadsheet, and something rather less helpful once its context has fallen off on the way to a database. Anandbir Singh Brar has built his working life at Excelra around that awkward journey.
His own route took a few turns. Economics and international relations at Tufts University. Energy finance at GE Capital. Renewable energy at Bharat Light & Power. An MBA at INSEAD. Then scientific data, a field in which understanding how specialists work together can matter as much to a chief executive as understanding any one specialty.
Brar joined the team identifying Excelra's opportunity in 2014 and became CEO in 2016. The dates describe two different stages: the early work of shaping a business, followed by the leadership of the independent company. Ten years into that chief executive role, his subject remains the usefulness of information, and the people required to make it useful.
The detour through energy
Before Excelra, Brar worked in GE Capital's Energy Financial Services business and held leadership responsibilities at a renewable energy startup. His remit there included business development, raising capital, growth and scaling. These were commercial and organizational jobs. They required taking an opportunity seriously enough to ask how it would become a functioning enterprise.
That background gives his later career an interesting shape. He entered a business filled with scientific specialists through the door marked business development. His initial Excelra title was director for new business development and initiatives, with responsibility for service strategy, expansion and innovation. The assignment put him close to a practical question: what would customers actually pay a scientific data company to solve?
The temptation in a career story is to turn every earlier job into a prophecy. Energy finance need not have secretly been preparation for databases. What carries across is a set of operating questions. Where is the demand? What capabilities must be built? Which work should be repeated, which should become a product, and how does an organization grow without losing the judgment that made it useful?
A new name, an existing craft
In October 2016, Brar visited Japan with Nandu Gattu, who headed Excelra's analytics business. Excelra had separated from GVK Bio's informatics division that April. The new company could concentrate on data curation, databases and analysis, rather than sit alongside a broader laboratory services operation. Independence gave an established craft a more specific commercial home.
The meeting photograph is refreshingly ordinary: laptops, papers, a conference table, people listening. No theatrical unveiling is required. A new enterprise also happens in rooms like this, explaining itself to partners who want to know what has changed and what will improve. Brar's message concerned focus: a business organized around informatics could devote itself more fully to that work.
Gattu's contribution to the discussion supplied the technical counterpart. Organizations were interested in computational prediction, but suitable data for assessing those predictions remained a problem. The pairing is revealing. Brar talked about the shape of the company; his colleague explained a customer's scientific obstacle. Commercial focus and technical judgment belonged in the same conversation.
The people between the disciplines
Brar has used the phrase “bilingual resources” for colleagues who combine science and technology. It is an inelegant piece of management vocabulary describing an elegant idea. The person who understands what a measurement means and how a system stores it can prevent an impressive amount of confusion before anyone calls it a technical problem.
Consider the handoff rather than the headline. A research record needs a structure, but it also needs meaning. Software can enforce a format. Scientific judgment helps decide what belongs in it. Someone has to recognize when a tidy entry has become misleading. The more elaborate the analysis downstream, the more expensive an unnoticed misunderstanding can become.
As a way of reading Brar's leadership, this emphasis puts recruitment and learning near the center of the business. He has described training, varied projects and accumulated experience as ways to develop that combination. A company selling knowledge needs to replenish knowledge inside its own walls. Otherwise, the brochure eventually becomes better informed than the workforce.
“Our people were, are, and will remain our biggest asset!”
Anandbir Singh Brar
Excelra's organizational picture makes the point concrete: biologists, chemists, data scientists, engineers and developers working within the same business. The interesting management task is what happens between them. A specialist's expertise earns its keep partly through the questions another specialist knows to ask. Brar's job includes making those exchanges productive enough that a customer experiences a coherent service.
Buying another set of capabilities
In April 2023, Excelra acquired BISC Global, a bioinformatics and data analytics consultancy with offices in Europe and the United States. The deal added expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning and analysis, along with software platforms. BISC's chief executive, Maarten Braspenning, welcomed the combination and its possibilities for the consulting teams.
For Brar, the stated rationale was capability and reach. That is a useful pair of words for understanding an acquisition in a specialist business. Geography puts a company closer to customers. Expertise changes the work it can undertake once it arrives. Buying both together creates an opportunity, while leaving the ordinary work of collaboration to be done.
The transaction also included BISC's Online Pipeline Platform, known as OP², and ImmunoRaptor, an analysis platform. These are tangible additions to a service business: tools that let a team package and repeat parts of its work. In this reading, expansion meant adding more ways to deliver expertise, alongside adding the experts themselves.
Brar's wider corporate setting included technology experience at board level. Sudip Nandy joined Excelra's board effective October 2021 after senior roles associated with Wipro, Aricent and ChrysCapital. D. S. Brar, the board's chairman, welcomed his experience in building organizations and managing growth. The appointment placed another strand of enterprise technology experience around a company already organized across several disciplines.
A million small additions
Some of the business's progress is easier to picture through database maintenance than through executive announcements. In December 2025, Excelra reported that GOSTAR Small Molecules had added 1,141,529 structure-activity relationship data points between March and November. Its compound count rose by 406,276 over the same period. Those figures describe a particular product and interval, rather than a score for the whole company.
The numbers make a less glamorous aspect of the enterprise visible. A database remains useful through continued work on coverage, structure and context. Announcing a collection is a moment; maintaining one is an occupation. For the executive overseeing it, growth includes the repeated task of making yesterday's promise true again today.
GOSTAR connects chemical structures with experimental information and gives researchers a way to explore those relationships. The commercial logic is cumulative: work done to organize information can serve subsequent questions. A customer should be able to spend more time examining the question and less time reconstructing the filing cabinet. Even a very clever filing cabinet appreciates being understood.
Read alongside Brar's career, the product makes the division of labor easier to see. A chief executive need not claim authorship of each record or each technical decision. The responsibility is to keep an organization capable of doing that work: people with the right expertise, a service customers understand, and room to improve the tools. Much of the achievement belongs to colleagues whose names do not appear in an acquisition headline.
This is also why the team theme matters beyond a pleasant statement about culture. The product depends on many judgments being made consistently. The customer buys access to their combined result. For Brar, the commercial question and the organizational question keep returning to the same place: can the business support the quality of work it asks customers to trust?
Golf, basketball and measurable work
Outside the business, Brar is a keen golfer and a sports enthusiast who likes attending NBA games during visits to the United States. It is a pleasingly concrete detail in a career concerned with the abstract movements of data. There is no need to recruit his golf swing into a theory of management. A person is allowed an interest that stays an interest.
His public professional activity is more closely tied to the company's work. His LinkedIn profile lists the Greater Hyderabad area and includes posts sharing Excelra developments and welcoming colleagues. In 2026, Excelra listed him among its team for Lab of the Future Congress Europe in Amsterdam and BioTechX USA in Boston. The event listings locate him where a chief executive's commercial work often happens: alongside colleagues, meeting a specialist audience.
In September 2026, Excelra published an announcement that it had been named an OpenAI Select Partner. Brar's accompanying statement returned to fragmented scientific information and the need to use it reliably. His stated ambition was practical: “Our focus now is turning that capability into research outcomes teams can measure”.
That sentence offers a fitting place to leave him. The energy financier became the operator of a business whose raw material is knowledge, distributed among records, software and people. The vocabulary has changed over a decade, and the company has added capabilities and colleagues. The recurring question is wonderfully plain: after all this work, what can the customer do? Brar's next chapter will be judged in the answer.