Tagged: bioengineering
24 results
Rarebird, Inc.
Rarebird is a New York and San Leandro-based specialty coffee company that replaces caffeine with paraxanthine (Px), the natural metabolite your body turns caffeine into. Founded by bioengineer Dr. Jeffrey Dietrich, Rarebird uses a patented reverse-infusion process to load 60mg of Px into single-origin Colombian decaf beans, promising alertness and focus without the jitters, anxiety, cortisol spikes, or wrecked sleep. Backed by Y Combinator, AgFunder, First Round Capital and the National Science Foundation, Rarebird is trying to make Px 'the third coffee' - a category alongside regular and decaf.
SweetBio, Inc.
SweetBio, Inc. is a Memphis-based medical device company that bioengineers manuka honey into solid, easy-to-apply wound dressings. Its flagship product, APIS, combines a collagen derivative, UMF-certified manuka honey, and hydroxyapatite into a trimmable sheet that is FDA-cleared and Medicare-covered for managing chronic and acute wounds, including diabetic foot ulcers. Founded in 2015 by sibling co-founders Kayla Rodriguez Graff and Dr. Isaac Rodriguez, the woman-led, Latinx-founded company aims to make advanced wound care accessible and affordable - taking a remedy as old as the ancient Egyptians and delivering it in a modern, standardized form.
Geoffrey von Maltzahn
Geoffrey von Maltzahn is the co-founder and CEO of Lila Sciences, a Cambridge company building what it calls scientific superintelligence: AI plus robotic labs that run the scientific method autonomously. A general partner at Flagship Pioneering, he has founded or co-founded a string of companies including Generate:Biomedicines, Tessera Therapeutics, Indigo Agriculture, Sana Biotechnology, Seres Therapeutics and Quotient Therapeutics, which together carry more than $10 billion in market value. He holds a PhD from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and is named on more than 200 patents.
Jeffrey Dietrich
Jeffrey Dietrich is a bioengineer-turned-coffee-founder who built Rarebird around paraxanthine, the molecule your body actually makes when it metabolizes caffeine. After a PhD at UC Berkeley in Jay Keasling's lab and nearly a decade co-founding and running R&D at the industrial biotech company Lygos, Dietrich turned his own dwindling caffeine tolerance into a company. Rarebird sells decaffeinated specialty coffee infused with lab-grade paraxanthine, promising the lift of coffee without the jitters, crash, or ruined sleep. Backed by Y Combinator, AgFunder, and two NSF grants, the company holds U.S. patents on the process and won the Specialty Coffee Association's Best New Product award.
Chloe Harrouche
Chloe Harrouche is the co-founder and CEO of The Lanby, a New York membership practice that reimagines primary care as a hospitality-led, relationship-driven experience. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering graduate and former Deloitte healthcare strategy consultant, she built The Lanby around a simple bet: that primary care should feel less like a waiting room and more like a team that actually knows you. Members get a dedicated care trio - a lead physician, a wellness advisor, and a care manager - working from one coordinated plan.
Eduardo Abeliuk
Eduardo Abeliuk is the founder and CEO of TeselaGen Biotechnology, a Silicon Valley company building AI agents and enterprise software for biological R&D. A Chilean-born physicist and electrical engineer with a Stanford PhD, he sits at the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence, and software - treating DNA as data and lab work as something that ought to be automated. Before biotech he built a Facebook app that hit a million users in weeks and an edtech platform across Latin America. He holds multiple US patents in computational biology and synthetic biology and his academic work has been cited more than a thousand times.
Luká Yancopoulos
Luká Yancopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Grapevine Technologies, a software company that acts as an intelligent purchasing agent for healthcare buyers - scanning vendors, prices, and supply routes in real time to cut what hospitals and clinics spend on medical supplies. A University of Pennsylvania VIPER dual-degree graduate in bioengineering and environmental studies, he pivoted from renewable-energy research to pandemic logistics in 2020, founding Pandemic Relief Supply, which delivered roughly $20 million in PPE to frontline workers. Grapevine grew out of that work, won the 2022 President's Innovation Prize, and raised about $2 million in early funding. His aim is blunt: drop the average national medical-supply spend by half, and ultimately make shopping for supplies unnecessary.
Nate Beyor
Nate Beyor is Chief Business Officer at Salt AI, the Los Angeles contextual-AI platform built for life sciences and healthcare. A bioengineer turned consultant turned operator, he holds a PhD in bioengineering from UC Berkeley, where he built microfluidic devices to detect pathogens. He spent his career at the seam between technology and biology - microfluidics, biologics manufacturing, stem cell therapy at Asterias Biotherapeutics, and digital health - before leading the Health Tech practice as a Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group. At Salt AI he runs corporate strategy, the solutions portfolio, and market expansion, helping translational scientists and drug developers move faster with AI they can actually trust in regulated settings.
Richard Novak
Richard Novak is a bioengineer and entrepreneur who co-founded and leads Unravel Biosciences, a rare disease therapeutics company built on its BioNAV platform that uses RNA network analysis to ask whether a drug will help real patients before working backward to find its target. A former lead engineer at Harvard's Wyss Institute with 15+ years in drug discovery systems, he also founded the swab company Rhinostics during the COVID-19 pandemic and the science-education nonprofit Future Scientist. Novak holds a PhD in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and a BS in Biology from Emory, and is a 2024 Termeer Fellow.
Shivang Dave
Shivang R. Dave is the co-founder and CEO of PlenOptika, a Cambridge, Massachusetts medical-device company behind QuickSee, a handheld autorefractor that measures eyeglass prescriptions in about 10 seconds using wavefront aberrometry. A bioengineer with a PhD in bioengineering and nanotechnology, Dave co-invented the device during the Madrid-MIT M+Vision fellowship and has grown PlenOptika from a four-fellow research team into an international company whose technology has helped correct vision for over 7 million people across 60+ countries, especially in low-resource settings.
Andrei Georgescu
Andrei Georgescu is the co-founder and CEO of Vivodyne, a biotech company that grows human tissues in the lab and runs drugs through them with robots and AI before any human ever swallows a pill. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering PhD who once sent lab-grown tissue to space with NASA, he started Vivodyne in 2020 because roughly 19 of every 20 drugs that work in animals fail in people. His pitch is blunt: test human medicine on human tissue, not on mice. In May 2025 Vivodyne raised a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures to scale a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic lab in South San Francisco.
Charles R. Bridges
Charles R. Bridges, M.D., Sc.D., is Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at CorVista Health, where he leads the science behind a machine-learning cardiac diagnostic platform. A cardiac surgeon turned engineer-executive, he holds an A.B. in applied physics from Harvard, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School (which he entered at 18), and both an M.S. in electrical engineering and a D.Sc. in chemical engineering from MIT. He was the first African American full professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, served as a technology chief at Johnson & Johnson's Janssen, and in 2022 was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. His record spans 175 peer-reviewed publications, 15 patents, and more than $10 million in continuous NIH funding.
Charvi Shetty
Charvi Shetty is the co-founder and CEO of Aluna, a San Francisco respiratory-health company that makes an FDA-cleared, pocket-sized spirometer paired with games and AI so patients can track lung function from home and send the data to their doctors. A UC Berkeley bioengineer with a UCSF master's in biomedical imaging, she left an algorithm-engineering job at Genentech to build the device, became the youngest recipient of an NSF SBIR grant, and is recognized as one of the youngest female CEOs to bring an FDA-cleared healthtech device to market. In 2023 Aluna raised a $15.3M Series B, bringing total funding to about $27M.
Solarbiotech
Solarbiotech is a U.S.-based synthetic biology and biomanufacturing company that helps companies move precision-fermentation products from lab bench to commercial scale. Built around a Norton, Virginia plant with fermentation capacity from 6L to 10,000L and a modular 'BioNodes' architecture, it offers end-to-end strain-to-shelf services - upstream fermentation, downstream processing, and commercial production - for food ingredients, nutraceuticals, cosmetics, enzymes, and industrial bioproducts. After a 2024 Chapter 11 restructuring, its assets were acquired by Pictor Biotech (led by ex-Novozymes executive Peter Rosholm) and unified in January 2025 with GPC Bio and Eleszto Genetika into a vertically integrated, 100+ person SynBio platform.
Valerie Daggett
Valerie Daggett is a University of Washington bioengineering professor turned biotech founder who spent three decades running the world's largest collection of protein-folding simulations, stumbled onto a structure nature was not supposed to make, and built a company around it. As founder and CEO of Seattle-based AltPep, she is commercializing the alpha-sheet: a strange protein geometry her lab predicted on a computer before anyone confirmed it in a test tube. Her SOBA-AD blood test, which spots toxic amyloid oligomers years before symptoms, earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and put her at the front of the race to catch Alzheimer's early.
Deven Hurt
Deven Hurt is the co-founder and CEO of PredictionStrike, a New York based platform he calls a stock market for sports fans, where users buy and sell virtual shares of NBA and NFL players whose prices move on real on-field performance. A Harvard College bioengineer turned Harvard Law graduate, he ran cybersecurity work touching Nike and the NBA before building the company with best friend Brad Chabra in 2018. He raised a $10M Series A led by Bullpen Capital, grew the platform past 200,000 users and $100M in transactions, and reached per-user profitability in late 2024.
Yinon Weiss
Yinon Weiss is a serial entrepreneur, decorated military veteran, and the Founder and CEO of Stress-Free Auto Care - a tech-enabled auto repair chain with 30+ locations across California and Texas. Before Stress-Free, he co-founded RallyPoint (the 'LinkedIn for the military') and CarDash (a transparent auto repair marketplace that went through Y Combinator S17 and was acquired). A UC Berkeley bioengineering grad with a Harvard MBA, Weiss served 10 years on active duty as a Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Platoon Commander and Army Special Forces officer, earning the Bronze Star before transitioning to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Matt Rappaport
Matt Rappaport is General Partner at Future Frontier Capital, a pre-seed frontier technology VC fund based in Berkeley, California. A former professional musician who studied West African Sabar drumming in Senegal, Rappaport brings an unconventional lens to deep tech investing - 20+ years of IP strategy expertise, a faculty role at UC Berkeley's Fung Institute, and a data-driven methodology using patent landscape analytics to identify emerging sectors before mainstream adoption. He co-founded FFC with longtime partner Mark Garner in late 2023, building a portfolio of 100+ early-stage startups across AI, biotech, robotics, climate, and advanced materials - achieving nearly 11X TVPI on previous investments.
Sungwon Lim
Dr. Sungwon Lim is the CEO and Co-Founder of ImpriMed, Inc., a Palo Alto-based precision oncology company that combines live cancer cell testing with AI to predict which drugs will work best for an individual patient's cancer - before treatment begins. Having raised $23M in Series A funding led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, ImpriMed has helped treat over 6,500 dogs with blood cancers across 130+ specialty hospitals in the US, Canada, England, and France, while publishing clinical data showing AI predictions tripled survival rates in relapsed B-cell lymphoma. A Stanford-trained bioengineer inspired by the potential of one powerful medicine to save millions, Lim pioneered a pivot into veterinary oncology as a proving ground before expanding the platform to human cancer treatment.
Cory Li
Cory Li is the CEO and co-founder of Spellbrush, the San Francisco-based generative AI studio behind niji-journey - the world's leading AI anime art platform built in collaboration with Midjourney. A MIT-trained bioengineer turned AI entrepreneur, Li previously co-founded Benchling (YC S12), the biotech R&D platform that went on to become a unicorn. At Spellbrush (YC W18), he leads a 31-person team building AI-powered anime games and creative tools - from WaifuLabs' anime portrait generator to Arrowmancer, an anime RPG where players design characters using generative AI, to niji-journey's mobile app with millions of users.
Mike Rosenbluth
Mike Rosenbluth is the Founder and CEO of Swing Therapeutics, the San Francisco-based company behind Stanza - the first FDA-authorized prescription digital therapeutic for fibromyalgia symptoms. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer with a UC Berkeley PhD in Bioengineering, Rosenbluth spent years at McKinsey, a VC firm (Versant Ventures), and cancer diagnostics company Veracyte before founding Swing in 2019. His company's landmark PROSPER-FM Phase 3 trial results were published in The Lancet in 2024, and Swing has raised over $30 million to bring evidence-based, non-drug behavioral therapy to the estimated 4 million Americans with fibromyalgia.
Kunwoo Lee
Kunwoo Lee is the CEO and Co-founder of BreezeBio (formerly GenEdit), a Brisbane, California-based biotech company pioneering non-viral gene delivery through its proprietary NanoGalaxy platform. A Siebel Scholar and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree who earned his PhD from UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Program in Bioengineering, Lee co-founded GenEdit in 2016 alongside Professor Niren Murthy and fellow researcher Hyo Min Park, building out a polymer nanoparticle library of thousands of chemically distinct compounds capable of delivering diverse genetic payloads to specific tissues. The company has raised over $118 million including a $60M Series B in February 2026, struck a landmark $644M collaboration deal with Genentech, and rebranded to BreezeBio to signal its pivot from platform company to clinical-stage therapeutics developer advancing BRZ-101 for Type 1 Diabetes.
Miray Tayfun
Miray Tayfun is the co-founder and CEO of Vivoo, a San Francisco-based health technology company that turns urine test strips into personalized wellness insights via a mobile app. A bioengineering graduate and serial founder, she built Vivoo from a personal frustration with expensive and slow health testing into a platform serving 300,000+ users across 50+ countries. Backed by Tim Draper and $19.4M in total funding, Vivoo expanded from subscription test strips to a $99 smart toilet unveiled at CES 2026, named Best of CES by Gadget Flow. Tayfun is a 2019 Australian Financial Review Top 100 Women of Influence honoree and 2018 Laureate Here for Good Award winner.
George Zachary
George Zachary is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures) and one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capitalists, known for seed-stage bets on Twitter, Yammer, and PillPack. A Greek-American MIT graduate who once helped build the Nintendo 64 at Silicon Graphics, he pivoted from consumer internet to bioengineering after a near-miss cancer scare in 2015 - writing more diligence on his first biotech deal than in the prior decade combined. He deploys capital guided by a single question: does this founder need - not just want - to build something big?