Shwetha Rao

About Shwetha Rao

I walked on stage for the first time when I was four years old and immediately fell in love with it. That feeling of stepping into something unfamiliar and figuring it out has stuck with me. I keep finding ways to recreate it. But it is not just the challenge I chase. I want the work to mean something. I have a technical background and I have always wanted to use it in a way that materially changes how people live. Soma is where those two things meet. We are driving a global brain heath movement and the question we are really asking is: what if millions of people understood their own brains better and actually worked toward cognitive fitness? That possibility is what gets me out of bed. I joined as the fourth employee and I hold the operational foundation together so the team can stay focused on answering it. Before Soma, I was at Gordian Biotechnology, supporting the founding team as they scaled toward Series B. I built the internal tooling, BD infrastructure, hiring and onboarding systems, and data pipelines for a drug repurposing program that shortlisted around candidates. Work that lives in the background and makes everything else move. Before that, in India, I spent years at Framewirk building digital public infrastructure across retail, mobility, education, and data governance at national scale. I learned what it means to build for someone who does not have the luxury of a slow or forgiving product. That perspective has shaped every decision I have made since.My curiosity led me to the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University, where I immersed myself in a multi-disciplinary postgraduate program. I\'m also a trained contemporary dancer, pageant winner, and content creator. I\'m passionate about projects that make a difference. If you\'d like to explore my work, visit: https://shwetharao.tech/

Experience

1. Founding Operations

   Soma

   Feb 2026 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

Education

• Ashoka University

  Postgraduate Degree, Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies

• Harvard Business School Online

  CORe Credential of Readiness

  2019 — 2019

• N M A M Institute of Technology, NITTE

  Bachelor of Engineering (BE), information science and engineering

  2014 — 2018

• Great Learning

  Postgraduate Degree, Artificial Intelligence