Govind Balakrishnan

Govind Balakrishnan grew up in India with ambitions in physics before discovering a second passion in media and journalism. He studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras before moving to London to pursue a career at the intersection of technology and storytelling. He went on to study Innovation Design Engineering through the joint MA/MSc programme at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, gaining a foundation in design thinking and systems that would shape his entrepreneurial approach. He later led strategy for BBC News, where he witnessed first-hand the challenge facing quality journalism: extraordinary reporting frequently failing to reach the audiences it deserved.

That frustration led Govind and his close friend Srikant Chakravarti to co-found Curio in 2016 — a London-based AI-powered audio journalism platform that partnered with more than 50 premium publishers including the Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal to make trusted journalism accessible to busy listeners. Over eight years, Curio returned nearly $10 million to its publishing partners and was featured twice at Apple keynotes, earning recognition as a category-defining product at the intersection of audio, AI, and media. When the founders chose to close Curio in January 2025 in response to a rapidly shifting AI landscape, they had already begun working on a more fundamental question: how should AI systems be designed to collaborate with people rather than replace them?

That question became Gibran, the AI research and product company Govind co-founded in 2025 alongside Srikant Chakravarti, evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin, and generative systems researcher Edgar Duéñez-Guzmán. At Gibran, Govind leads product, design, and go-to-market strategy, bringing the same storytelling instincts and mission-driven perspective that defined his work at Curio. The company is building scale-free AI systems — models that evolve through human interaction rather than static pretraining — initially targeting data-sparse domains like drug discovery and scientific research where conventional LLMs struggle.

Gibran raised $2.6 million in seed funding in July 2025 from Together Fund, the early-stage venture firm co-founded by Freshworks' Girish Mathrubootham and Eka Software's Manav Garg, alongside Mercuri. Govind's central thesis at Gibran reflects a perspective developed over a decade building products at the frontier of AI and media: that the most transformative systems are not those that automate human tasks, but those that evolve with people, amplifying their creativity and autonomy over time.