Sasan Amini left Tehran at 22 with a PhD plan and a habit of asking why. Clear Labs, the genomics company he built, now runs in more than half of America's public health labs.
He was ten years old and could barely reach the espresso machine. But Sasan Amini had noticed something about his father and uncle's coffee shop in Tehran: it closed every afternoon, and nobody could tell him why. So he made a proposal. Let me run the machine during those dead hours. They said yes. By his own telling, the shop has stayed open in the afternoons ever since - more than 25 years and counting.
It is a small story, and Amini tells it as one. But it holds the whole shape of the person who would later co-found Clear Labs, a genomics company that today sits inside more than half of America's public health laboratories. The pattern was there early: notice a gap nobody else is bothered by, ask why, then volunteer to fix it before anyone has given you permission.
Amini grew up in Iran and studied biotechnology at the University of Tehran. At 22, he left - family, homeland, the familiar - and moved to the United States to chase a PhD in genomics at Princeton, where his work connected to the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. He has been open that the decision was not casual. It meant giving up a great deal for scientific work he felt he could not do at home.
That immigrant arithmetic - what you leave behind versus what you might build - runs underneath much of how he talks about risk. He does not romanticize the leap. He plans for it.
After Princeton, he landed in the advanced research department at Illumina, the company at the center of the DNA-sequencing revolution. It was, by most measures, an excellent place to sit. Sequencing costs were collapsing - dropping faster than Moore's Law - and Amini had a front-row seat to a technology getting cheaper and more powerful by the quarter.
Most people with that seat keep it. Amini saw the falling cost curve and read it as a question rather than a comfort: if sequencing is becoming this cheap, why is it still locked inside a handful of elite labs? In 2014 he left to answer it.
Clear Labs was founded in 2014 by Amini alongside Mahni Ghorashi and Ramin Khaksar. The founding premise was almost stubbornly simple: next-generation sequencing (NGS) could transform food safety, infectious disease, agriculture, newborn screening and oncology - but almost nobody could actually use it. The workflows were too complex, the costs too high, the results too slow. The technology was miraculous and mostly stranded.
So Clear Labs built a box. The platform folds DNA sequencing, robotics and cloud-based analytics into one automated system, aimed at labs that have no genomics expertise on staff. Feed it a sample; get back an answer. The mission phrase the company uses - "NGS for all" - is less a slogan than a design constraint.
In practice that meant hunting foodborne pathogens - listeria, salmonella - and verifying ingredients and GMO status for food brands trying to head off recalls. The early market was food safety, an unglamorous but enormous problem where a single missed contamination can sicken thousands.
Then 2020 happened. A company built to find salmonella in chicken suddenly had a technology the world urgently needed pointed somewhere else: sequencing SARS-CoV-2. The automated platform that made pathogen detection push-button turned out to be exactly what overwhelmed public health labs needed to characterize and track a new virus.
The pivot was fast - products to market in weeks, not the usual grind of months. The FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization in September 2020. By January 2021 Clear Labs had launched whole genome sequencing for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance, and by that March the platform had reached more than half of U.S. public health laboratories, with labs in Nebraska, Nevada, New York, California and Kansas among the users.
Speed like that is not luck. It is what happens when a platform is built to be flexible and a founder has spent his whole life volunteering before being asked. The espresso machine, again - just with a much larger stake.
Investors followed the trajectory. Clear Labs raised a $6.5M Series A in 2015, $16M Series B in 2016, $21M Series C in 2018, and a $60M Series D in 2021 led by Morgan Stanley and T. Rowe Price - more than $179M in total across the life of the company.
Ask most founders what carried them through and you get some version of "never give up." Amini kept the mantra but sharpened it into something more useful. Someone once told him not to give up. Over time, he edited the line.
That single word - wrong - is the difference between stubbornness and judgment, and it maps onto how he runs the work. He talks about focus as an art: "Prioritizing your bandwidth and limited resources on key initiatives is an art." He talks about building a business as something you cannot do alone: "You can't build a great business on your own." And he is blunt about the cost of the whole enterprise - "Entrepreneurship requires extreme mental toughness."
He tends to route decisions back to a single test: does the problem matter? "It's critical to focus on solving problems that matter," he says, while staying "open to being challenged" and willing to refine direction when the evidence pushes back. It is a scientist's temperament applied to a business - hold the hypothesis loosely, follow the data.
For all the machinery and the funding rounds, the thing Amini seems proudest of is quieter: a small lab with no sequencing background can now run tests that used to demand a doctorate. The technology stopped being a privilege of the few. That was the whole point.
Watch: Amini interview, SQF International ConferenceThe coffee shop is still open in the afternoons. The kid who could not reach the espresso machine now runs a company that helped a country watch a virus move through it. Same instinct, wildly different scale: see the gap, ask why, build the thing that closes it.