In 1986, Mohan Iyer walked into Genentech as a process engineer and got assigned a job that had never been done before: scale up the production of pharmaceutical proteins to kilogram quantities. Biotech's first medicines — things like insulin and growth hormone — were still being figured out. Iyer was part of the team doing the figuring.
He stayed seven years. When Roche acquired Genentech, he left to get his MBA at Yale. That pivot — from bench to business — would define the next three decades. Not in spite of his engineering background, but because of it. He never stopped being someone who understood what the science was actually saying.
"I am intrinsically drawn to a company story where there is a stunning insight from biology with revolutionary possibilities."
— Mohan Iyer, General Partner, IndieBio SF
The MBA led to healthcare consulting at IBM's Wilkerson Group, then to corporate development at diaDexus for nearly a decade, then to investment banking at Burrill & Company. By the time he landed at Tethys Bioscience as CFO — where the company built the first commercial test to identify people at high risk of converting to type 2 diabetes — Iyer had assembled an unusual combination: deep scientific literacy, financial discipline, and operating muscle across every company function.
At Second Genome, he joined as Chief Business Officer when the company was pioneering microbiome genomics as a therapeutic target — before "microbiome" was a dinner-party word. He stayed five years, helping establish the company's commercial viability through partnerships and the early science of linking gut microbiota to human disease outcomes.
Then came Pendulum Therapeutics, where he served as COO and helped commercialize precision probiotics — bacteria engineered to help people with type 2 diabetes manage their A1C levels without additional medication. The science was counterintuitive: fix metabolic disease with microbes. Iyer understood why it wasn't.
