Born in August 1985 in Ohio’s Cincinnati, Ramaswamy is the son of Indian immigrants who moved to the US from Kerala. While his father worked at the General Electric Plant in Evendale, Ohio, his mother was a geriatric psychiatrist in Cincinnati.
Ramaswamy finished his undergraduate studies, majoring in Biology from Harvard College in 2007, and later went to Yale Law School to pursue a Doctor of Jurisprudence. According to his New Yorker profile, published in December 2022, he was the president of the Harvard Political Union while studying at the college and used to perform “Eminem covers and original free-market-themed rap songs as a kind of alter ego called Da Vek.”
The profile also said that Ramaswamy went to Kerala frequently while growing up to spend summers with his family.
His rise as a tech entrepreneur
After starting and then selling his technology company in his early 20s, joining a hedge fund based in New York and taking a standup-comedy class, Ramaswamy in 2014 established Roivant — his pharmaceutical venture that focuses on applying technology to drug development. The entrepreneur quickly gained popularity for his work in the field and in 2015 was featured on the cover of Fobes magazine, which called him “The 30-Year-Old CEO Conjuring Drug Companies from Thin Air.”[
After stepping down as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Roivant Sciences in 2021, Ramaswamy co-founded Strive Asset Management, an Ohio-based asset management firm that was backed financially by billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel and his law school friend, JD Vance, who is a venture capitalist. According to the New Yorker, Ramaswamy considers Strive as an “anti-woke” asset-management firm, which doesn’t ask the companies it invested in to “push political agendas.”