Sam Santhosh

Sam Santhosh is an entrepreneur with a 35-year track record of creating successful companies. For the first 20 years, Sam was in the IT industry and made his mark by setting up California Software Co Ltd (Calsoft) and taking it to the public in India. In the last 15 years, Sam led the Genomic revolution in India by incubating and launching multiple companies leveraging Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and Bioinformatics, through his incubator SciGenom Labs in Kochi and San Francisco. Sam incubated MedGenome in 2010 and over the next 10 years, raised $120M from leading venture capital companies like Sequoia, Sofina, Leapfrog, and IFC. Sam established MedGenome as the leading genomic diagnostics and research company in India and he is often called the ‘Genome man of India’. In 2019 Sam was in Goldman Sachs’s list of the Top 100 intriguing entrepreneurs of the world. Currently, Sam continues to incubate new companies in SynBio and AI in SciGenom labs and promote research and education through the SciGenom Research Foundation (SGRF), a trust that he established in 2010. His passion now is in creating a 20-acre medicinal plant garden based on the 17th-century magnum opus ‘Hortus Malabaricus’ (Garden of Malabar) at his hometown of Thrissur, Kerala. Sam is a mechanical engineer with an MBA from IIM Calcutta. He is the author of ‘Sam’s Twelve Commandments for the Indian Entrepreneur’ published in 2023. He maintains homes in San Francisco and Kochi while continuously travelling across the world visiting museums, archaeological sites and botanical gardens.