Shiva Ayyadurai consolidates for the US presidential run in 2024.

Washington-born academic and businessman Shiva Ayyadurai is the fourth Indian and American to announce his candidature as an independent candidate for the 2024 US presidential election.

The 59-year-old Mumbai native recently announced his campaign, saying he wants to serve America beyond “left” and “right” to provide solutions people need and deserve.

“I am running for President of the United States of America. We are at a crossroads where we can go into a Golden Age or into darkness,” said Ayyadurai.

During his campaign, he said that the old guard of professional politicians, political scientists, lobbyists, and academics who invade the country and local governments with corruption and nepotism are preventing America from growing up.

Ayyadurai left India in 1970, lived the American dream with his parents, and settled in Paterson, New Jersey. Ayyadurai, a four-degree Fulbright scholar from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expressed interest in becoming Twitter’s CEO last year.

According to his campaign website, he founded seven high-tech companies, including EchoMail, CytoSolve, and Systems Health, and “invented email” when he was just 14 years old.

He is currently the founder and CEO of CytoSolve, Inc., which discovers cures for serious diseases ranging from pancreatic cancer to Alzheimer’s.

Ayyadurai’s announcement comes shortly after Indian-American aerospace engineer Hirsh Vardhan Singh stepped into the ring for the Republican nomination, honouring former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.