Lydian Accelerator, an open-sourced non-profit to find a treatment for their daughter's genetic disorder, could help others too, believe Rohan Seth and his wife Jennifer Fernquist
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When Elon Musk kicked off a conversation in a digital room on Clubhouse on February 1, it sparked off interest in the iOS-only audio-chat app among India’s entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. More of them are joining it, and tweeting about FOMO (fear of missing out).
The one-year-old San Francisco-based startup behind it, Alpha Exploration, has already reportedly hit unicorn status after its January series B funding, led by investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. It raised $100 million, and was valued at a billion dollars after the funding, according to news site Axios Media.
While Clubhouse has also become the latest must-be-on-it social media platform for celebrities and politicians, what is lesser known is co-founder Rohan Seth’s personal battle, along with his wife Jennifer Fernquist’s, to save their little daughter, Lydia, from a rare, but devastating genetic disorder.
A message on LinkedIn and an email to a common Clubhouse address for Seth and co-founder Paul Davison, hadn’t elicited a response at the time of this story, but here is what’s on the internet, from Seth’s own posts.
Lydia Niru Seth, named after her late grandmother, was born in December 2018, and it became apparent that something was wrong when she started having seizures soon after birth, Seth recalled seven months later in a blogpost on Medium. “We heard everything from ‘it's probably viral, go home’ to ‘paperwork for genetic testing is really hard’. ‘Meanwhile, let's keep baby sedated’,” Seth had written in June 2019, on Twitter.