Dhara Mungra

Dhara Mungra

Co-founder & Product Lead, SimPPL.
Adjunct Lecturer, University of Mannheim.
MS in Data Science, NYU.

Hi, I’m Dhara.

On a mission to run fast — toward better products at SimPPL, and toward whatever the next race turns out to be.

I am the co-founder and product lead at SimPPL, a research collective building open-access AI tools for newsrooms, fact-checkers, non-profits, and civil society organizations in the global majority. Since February 2026, I have also been the inaugural Gustav Struve Fellow in Global Responsible AI at the University of Mannheim, where I teach an AI Product Development workshop focused on practical industry applications and ethical design. I am a community member at the Tech Global Institute, where I have co-authored research on networked political influence and platform accountability across the Global Majority.

Earlier, I was co-founder and CTO at Sakhi (Jul 2024 – Dec 2025), an MIT- and UNICEF-incubated maternal health literacy venture; a data scientist at Bombora building the Identity Graph (2021–2024); and one of the original developers of Gumshoe at MuckRock — an NLP tool that helps journalists comb through FOIA email corpora. I completed my MS in Data Science at New York University, where I worked closely with professors and researchers who are now leading research initiatives at Anthropic.

I was also selected as a research group member at the Center for AI and Digital Policy, contributing to the 2026 CAIDP Index through a country-level assessment of Malta’s AI policy, and participated in the Global Changemakers Summit 2025, collaborating with international leaders to prototype scalable solutions for underserved communities.

Mentorship sits at the core of all of this. I believe education is the most reliable leveling ground — a belief shaped early, when I volunteered with Yuva Unstoppable (2017–2019) teaching Math, Science, and English to children from underprivileged backgrounds. Today, most of SimPPL’s team comes from Tier-III universities in India, pursuing research careers in AI, ML, and the social sciences.

Outside of work, I am a black belt — I taught martial arts to kids and led self-defense workshops for women and girls at RKKF (2018–2019). I have fenced, kickboxed, and run two half marathons and a full marathon. Tennis is probably next.

Recent

  • May 2026 — Joined a fishbowl session on AI and the future of journalism at the International Press Institute Media Innovation Festival in Vienna.
  • Apr 2026 — Coffee chat at DW Akademie with journalists and fact-checkers; rolled out Arbiter’s claims-identification features to beta users.
  • Mar 2026 — SimPPL selected into the Fast Forward 2026 Tech Nonprofit Accelerator in San Francisco.
  • Feb 2026 — Joined the University of Mannheim as inaugural Gustav Struve Fellow.