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Cambridge-based entrepreneur V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai has announced his 2018 bid to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. (Photo courtesy: Shiva 4 Senate campaign)

CAMBRIDGE -- Despite never having run for public office, entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadurai said he's not intimidated by the possibility of squaring off against Democrat Elizabeth Warren in one of the highest-profile U.S. Senate races of 2018.

Ayyadurai, who announced his Republican U.S. Senate bid in February, said that while he may not be the GOP establishment's candidate, his track record of overcoming barriers and fighting big institutions makes him the best person to take on the high-powered incumbent.

"I know that Warren -- in spite of (what) people think she is -- is extremely weak," he said in an interview. "She's a formidable enemy, but weak in the sense that where she's fundamentally coming from, her basis of where she's coming from, has massive weakness and I know how to expose that weakness."

Ayyadurai, 53, moved to the U.S. from India as a child. He compared the Democratic senator and former Harvard University professor to those at the top of India's caste system -- a social structure in which he said his family held a low position.

"If you look at what we have today, we have a neo-caste system and at the top of that heap is people like Warren," he said. "They are the academics, career politicians and lawyer/lobbyists. And that clan ... is extremely spineless, they never expect to be challenged. And I've challenged them."

Taking a jab at reports from the 2012 Senate campaign suggesting that Warren claimed Native American heritage in her academic career, Ayyadurai added that he's "the real Indian who can beat this fake Indian."

He echoed this argument in his new book, "All-American Indian: This Fight is Your Fight" -- a play on the Massachusetts Democrat's newly released publication titled "This Fight is Our Fight."

Cautioning that another win for Warren in Massachusetts would "eviscerate" the Republican Party, Ayyadurai argued that he's "probably the only formidable person on the stage who can take her and debate her and expose her."

He further brushed off the idea that other Republicans in the race -- particularly state Rep. Geoff Diehl, R-Whitman, who formed an exploratory committee to raise funds for a potential campaign -- are better suited for a general election matchup against the incumbent due to their political backgrounds.

"A number of people have said to me, 'Oh, we're going to support Geoff Diehl because we know him.' Nice guy, but he's not going to be able to take on Warren," Ayyadurai said. "That is a form of nepotism. Just because you know somebody, that is not what the American dream is about. Innovation and meritocracy was what America was based on."

If elected, Ayyadurai said he hopes to bring a sense of innovation to the Senate when it comes to addressing hot-button issues, as well as to look at problems from an engineering and science perspective.

Casting himself as a "Lincoln Republican," the entrepreneur said his campaign platform will largely focus on three areas: immigration, education and innovation.

As an immigrant, Ayyadurai said he believes it is important that the U.S. secure its borders, root out so-called sanctuary cities and ensure people enter the country legally.

He added that he also supports ensuring parents and students have choices when it comes to public education, and argued that more must be done to address what he called "pay-to-play" academic science research.

Ayyadurai, who holds four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the founder and chairman of CytoSolve, a startup that has developed a "computational platform for scalable integration of molecular pathway models" used in drug development.

He is one of three Republicans who have filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for the Massachusetts Senate seat in 2018. Fellow GOP hopeful Diehl filed a statement of candidacy in mid-April, while Allen Rodney Waters, of Mashpee, submitted his paperwork to run as a Republican in late December, accord to FEC records.

John P. Devine, of Woburn, has also filed papers to run as an independent candidate for Senate.