Ajay Royan

Biography

Ajay Royan and Peter Thiel, both cofounders and investors in Mithril, serve as its investment committee. Peter chairs the committee, and Ajay leads the firm. They have been investing together since 2003. Ajay Royan Ajay Royan cofounded Mithril and heads the firm as its managing general partner. He and Peter Thiel constitute the firm’s investment committee. At Mithril, Ajay has led investments in innovative companies located both within Silicon Valley and around the world. He serves on many of these companies’ boards, including C2FO, AppDirect, Adimab, and Auris, helping them successfully navigate high-growth periods by working with founders on competitive and organizational strategy, as well as macro trends. Before forming Mithril, Ajay was a managing director and senior investor at Clarium Capital Management, where he led unlevered growth investments and was a member of the core team that grew the firm into a multi-billion dollar fund. Ajay began his career at Braxton Associates, a unit of Deloitte, where he specialized in corporate strategy. Ajay serves on the Science Advisory Board of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and was elected to the Presidents’ Circle of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Ajay frequently advocates for entrepreneurship and innovation at technology and finance events, as well as public forums such as Bloomberg, CNBC, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He has been a guest lecturer on macro investing at Yale University, is a charter member of the C100, and has served as a participant in the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Global Markets and as one of the Churchill Club’s Tech Trends Experts. Ajay grew up in India, Abu Dhabi, and Canada. He was educated at Yale University. Peter Thiel Peter Thiel cofounded Mithril, and serves as chairman of the investment committee. As a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Peter has been involved in some of the most dynamic companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past two decades. In 1998, Peter made e-commerce easier, faster, and more secure by co-founding PayPal, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. Peter was the first outside investor and director at Facebook, and launched Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman of the board of directors. Peter established and funds the Thiel Foundation, which promotes freedom in all its forms while working to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future. Peter ignited a national debate regarding the role of formal education when he launched the Thiel Fellowship, which brings together some of the world’s most creative and motivated young people and helps them bring their most ambitious projects to life. To date, Thiel Fellows have produced more than $200 million in economic activity across 58 organizations that are creating new technologies and deploying them around the world. In 2014, he set out to inspire and instruct the next generation of entrepreneurs on building unique and valuable businesses by writing the book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Peter was educated at Stanford University.

Research Interest

pharmaceutical