Maneesh
Jain

At ten weeks of pregnancy - before a heartbeat has steadied, before a bump is visible, before most women have told anyone - a Mirvie blood test can already see what's coming. Not by guessing. By reading the RNA messages that the placenta sends into the mother's bloodstream: a molecular conversation that, until recently, no one knew how to decode.

Maneesh Jain learned to listen to that conversation. He is the CEO and Co-founder of Mirvie, a South San Francisco biotech that built the first RNA platform designed to predict pregnancy complications - preeclampsia, preterm birth, gestational diabetes - months before symptoms appear. The company's Encompass test was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. The FDA gave it Breakthrough Device Designation in 2022. The Gates Foundation is an investor.

Jain's path to the placenta started in physics. He took his BS at Caltech in 1990, completed a Master's in Applied Physics at Stanford, then turned into the genomics revolution as it was just beginning. At the Stanford Genome Technology Center, years before the Human Genome Project finished, he learned what it meant to build tools that let scientists ask questions about DNA at scale. That lesson - make the instrument first, then let biology do the talking - became the thread running through every company he built next.

The Exit Machine

ParAllele BioScience came first: an early genomics company working on high-throughput genotyping. Then Auriphex Bioscience, which found its home inside Affymetrix, the chip giant that turned gene expression profiling from a research novelty into clinical practice.

Then Ion Torrent. Founded in 2007, Ion Torrent built a DNA sequencer on a semiconductor chip - a device that used hydrogen ions instead of light to read genetic code, making sequencing cheaper, faster, and potentially deployable in places far from a major hospital. Life Technologies acquired it, and the technology cascaded outward into labs across the world.

Jain then joined Butterfly Network as President and COO. Butterfly built a handheld ultrasound device - essentially putting medical imaging on a chip the size of a smartphone. He helped raise over $100M and steer the company through FDA clearance. The vision, again, was democratization: make a diagnostic tool powerful enough for the operating room small enough to fit in a white coat pocket.

After Butterfly came Cirina, co-founded in 2014 with Dennis Lo - the scientist who invented non-invasive prenatal testing for Down syndrome. Cirina developed blood-plasma tests for early disease detection. GRAIL acquired it, folding Cirina's work into one of the most ambitious liquid biopsy programs in medicine.

Reading the Placenta

Mirvie started from a question: what if the placenta had been sending signals all along, and medicine just hadn't been reading them? Stephen Quake - Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford and the scientist who helped develop the first non-invasive prenatal test for chromosomal abnormalities - had the same question. Jain and Quake co-founded Mirvie in 2018.

The platform they built analyzes tens of thousands of RNA transcripts simultaneously from a single maternal blood draw. The RNA comes from the mother, the baby, and the placenta - a three-way molecular conversation about how the pregnancy is proceeding. Machine learning finds the patterns that precede complications, patterns too subtle and too numerous for any clinician to spot by conventional means.

In January 2022, a landmark study published in Nature reported on 2,539 blood samples from 1,840 women across the United States, Europe, and Africa. The Mirvie RNA platform detected 75% of preeclampsia cases. Three months later, data published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology showed 76% accuracy in predicting early preterm birth - identifying the distinct biological pathways involved, not just a statistical correlation.

For context: preeclampsia kills around 70,000 mothers globally every year and is a leading cause of preterm birth. The current standard of care catches it only when symptoms appear - at which point options narrow fast. Mirvie's approach turns the timeline on its head.

The Investors, the Gold Medalist, and the Gates Foundation

In May 2022, Mirvie closed a $60M Series B led by Decheng Capital. GV, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Foresite Capital, and BlackRock joined the round. So did Allyson Felix - eleven Olympic medals, the most decorated track and field athlete in US history, and an investor motivated by the specific reality of maternal health disparities that affect Black women at disproportionate rates in America.

The Gates Foundation's presence in the cap table reflects the global ambition of what Mirvie is building. The 45 million women who experience serious pregnancy complications each year are not concentrated in one geography. The RNA platform has been validated across diverse populations in the US, Europe, and Africa, specifically because Jain understood from the start that a test calibrated only on Western cohorts would be useless at scale.

Building the Machine

In September 2023, Mirvie achieved CLIA certification for high-complexity clinical testing - becoming the first RNA-based pregnancy health company to clear that regulatory bar. That certification transforms Mirvie from a research outfit into an operating clinical laboratory. The Encompass test is the commercial product built on top of it.

As of 2025, Mirvie operates from South San Francisco with 42 employees, annual revenue around $2.5M, and a technology stack that includes AWS infrastructure, machine learning pipelines, and Epic integration - meaning results can flow directly into hospital electronic health records. Jain spoke at SXSW 2025. A new venture round closed in late 2025.

The Person Behind the Platform

On his Twitter profile, Jain describes himself as "a scientist by profession and a foodie by passion" with interests in nature, landscapes, music, and poetry. The combination is not incidental. The scientists who built transformative diagnostic tools - who actually changed what clinicians can see - tend to be people who pay attention to things other people miss. A landscape photographer trains themselves to notice light. A genomicist trains themselves to notice signal in noise.

Jain has been building with that instinct since before genomics was a word in clinical medicine. The Caltech physics training, the Stanford genomics apprenticeship, the five companies across sequencing, imaging, and liquid biopsy - each one a different instrument for reading the body. Mirvie is the sixth instrument. It listens to what the placenta is already saying.