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.
Michael Driscoll is the co-founder and CEO of Rill Data, a company building fast, operational business intelligence dashboards on top of an embedded analytics engine. He previously co-founded Metamarkets, the ad-analytics firm whose internal database became the open-source project Apache Druid before Snap acquired the company in 2017. A bioinformatician turned serial entrepreneur, Driscoll began his career as a software engineer on the Human Genome Project, holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University and an AB from Harvard, and has spent three decades arguing that metrics, not tables or dashboards, are the real interface between data teams and the businesses they serve.
Stephen Larson is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur who co-founded OpenWorm, the open-science effort to build the first complete digital organism by simulating the 302-neuron nervous system of the roundworm C. elegans. He is co-founder and CEO of MetaCell, a life-science software company that helps pharmaceutical firms and research institutions visualize, analyze, and collaborate on complex biological data. Trained at MIT in computer science and AI and at UC San Diego in neuroscience, he sits at the intersection of code and biology, betting that understanding a worm in silico is a first step toward understanding the human brain.
ArkeaBio is a Boston climate-biotech company building the first vaccine that cuts methane emissions from cattle. The shot trains a cow's immune system to produce antibodies that travel to the rumen and suppress methanogens - the microbes that turn digestion into greenhouse gas. Livestock methane accounts for roughly 6% of global emissions, and ArkeaBio's pitch is blunt: a vaccine is the lowest-cost, most scalable way to attack that number. Backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and a roster of climate and ag investors, the company is moving from animal studies into full field trials, targeting a 20% methane reduction and a first product in market around 2028.
HelixNano is a Cambridge/Boston-based biotechnology company building what it calls the world's most advanced mRNA platform - combining synthetic biology and machine learning to make vaccines and therapies that augment the immune system. Founded in 2014 by sci-fi novelist and mathematician Hannu Rajaniemi and synthetic biologist Nikolai Eroshenko, the Y Combinator-backed startup has pursued variant-resistant COVID-19 vaccine candidates and machine-learning-designed personalized cancer vaccines built on 'precision neoantigens'.
LatchBio is a San Francisco company building an AI-native data platform for biology. It lets scientists store, analyze, and visualize data from 40+ lab kits and instruments without writing code or managing cloud infrastructure - turning raw sequencing and experimental output into reproducible, publication-ready results. Founded in 2021 by three Berkeley dropouts, it now serves thousands of scientists at biopharmas and research labs and is positioning itself as 'the AI agent for biology data analysis.'
Alfredo Andere is the co-founder and CEO of LatchBio, a San Francisco company building cloud and machine-learning infrastructure for biology. Born in Mexico City and raised in Guadalajara, he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, worked at Google on the TensorFlow-NumPy framework and as a data engineer at Facebook, then dropped out of Berkeley in early 2021 with two college friends to start LatchBio. The trio conducted roughly 300 customer interviews before writing code, raised an oversubscribed $5M seed led by Lux Capital, and have since scaled the company through a $28M Series A and a 2026 Series B, bringing total funding to $163M. Andere is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
NuCicer is a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding a new generation of high-protein chickpeas. Spun out of UC Davis and built on the largest pool of chickpea genetic diversity on earth, the company uses predictive (precision) breeding and genomics to develop chickpea varieties with up to 75% more protein than conventional beans - alongside better flavor, lower fat, and higher fiber. NuCicer sells whole beans, functional flours, protein powders, and bespoke trait packages to food brands seeking minimally processed, sustainable plant-protein ingredients that out-compete soy and pea isolates on taste and texture.
Deniz Kavi is the co-founder and CEO of Tamarind Bio, a San Francisco company that turns hundreds of complex computational-biology models - AlphaFold, RFdiffusion, OpenFold and more - into a point-and-click web tool and API so scientists can design drug candidates without writing code or wrangling cloud infrastructure. A Stanford computer-science graduate who did computational-biology research and engineered software at Stanford School of Medicine, he started the company in 2023 with co-founder Sherry Liu, went through Y Combinator's W24 batch, and in February 2026 raised a $13.6M Series A led by Dimension Capital. Tamarind now serves 10,000+ scientists, including 8 of the top 20 global pharma companies, and was tapped to run the inference infrastructure behind Eli Lilly's TuneLab 2.0.
Tamarind Bio is a San Francisco software company building cloud infrastructure that lets bench scientists run 250+ AI and physics-based models for drug discovery - tools like AlphaFold, RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN and GROMACS - through a no-code web interface and API, without managing GPUs, data pipelines or DevOps. Founded in 2023 by Stanford computer scientist Deniz Kavi and Sherry Liu, the company serves over 10,000 scientists, including 8 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, and raised a $13.6M Series A in February 2026.
Verge Genomics is a South San Francisco biotech that builds drugs from human biology instead of mouse models. By assembling one of the largest proprietary multi-omics datasets drawn directly from human brain and tissue samples, then mining it with machine learning, its CONVERGE platform identifies disease targets and drug candidates for neurodegenerative diseases like ALS, ALS-FTD and Parkinson's. Founded in 2015 by Alice Zhang and Jason Chen, the company famously moved its first AI-discovered drug from research to the clinic in four years. After that ALS candidate failed its early trial, Verge has refocused on its core asset, the platform, repositioning to supply other drug developers with human-grounded target data.
Watershed Bio (legally Watershed Informatics) is a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building a unified, cloud-based platform for biological data analysis. Its product, Omics Bench, lets biologists and bioinformaticians securely store, harmonize, and analyze multi-omic data - genomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbial sequencing and protein folding - using customizable and AI-assisted workflows backed by elastic supercomputing. The pitch: go from sample to therapeutic insight in a single day instead of weeks, closing the gap between high-code and no-code bioinformatics for drug-discovery teams.
Reza Javan is the CEO and co-founder of Telescope, a London-based AI prospecting platform that automates B2B outbound across email and LinkedIn. Before he sold software to salespeople, he was Dr. Reza Rezaei Javan, an Oxford DPhil microbiologist who sequenced thousands of pneumococcal genomes and discovered new families of antimicrobial peptides. He swapped the lab bench for a startup at Entrepreneur First's LD17 cohort, where Telescope was born in 2021. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Soma Capital and Entrepreneur First.
Biohm Technologies is a Cleveland-based microbiome innovation company that studies the gut as a whole - bacteria and fungi together - rather than bacteria alone. Built on 40+ years of fungal research by Dr. Mahmoud Ghannoum, the scientist who named the mycobiome, Biohm develops data-driven biotic ingredients and gut-health testing solutions. Its flagship ingredient Mycohsa is the first probiotic blend clinically shown to break down digestive biofilms, and its Symbiont discovery platform mines a large bacterial-fungal dataset to design targeted microbiome products. After a B2B pivot in 2024, the company now sells ingredients and microbiome science to nutraceutical and food brands.
Manifold is a Boston-area applied-AI company building a vertical agent platform for life sciences. Its software helps pharma companies, molecular diagnostics firms, biobanks and academic medical centers turn messy multimodal biomedical data into governed, analysis-ready insight - compressing workflows that used to take months into minutes, while keeping the data governance that regulated research demands. Founded in 2016 and led by CEO Vinay Seth Mohta, the company raised an $18M Series B in December 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $40M.
Sam Schatz is the CEO and co-founder of Biohm Technologies, a Cleveland-based microbiome company betting that the future of gut health lives in fungi, not just bacteria. After spending a decade as AeroFarms' first employee scaling vertical farming from a startup into a global leader, he pivoted to the gut, turning a direct-to-consumer wellness brand into a B2B ingredients and data company built on a proprietary dataset of bacterial and fungal gut populations. He pairs data science with biology, raised a $4.52M Series B in 2025, and shipped Mycohsa, a probiotic blend clinically shown to break down digestive biofilms. Off the clock he is an Adirondack 46er and open-water swimmer.
Benchling is a cloud platform built for biotech R&D - a single, biology-first system of record where scientists design experiments, track samples, manage molecular data, and collaborate. Founded in 2012 out of MIT, it has grown into the operating system for modern life science, used by hundreds of thousands of scientists at companies ranging from startups to the largest biopharma firms, and is now embedding AI agents and predictive models directly into the lab workflow.
Fang Cheng is a serial founder who builds AI that actually answers the question. She co-founded Touchco (acquired by Amazon, became the Kindle), founded Linc (acquired by Capacity in 2024), served as SVP & GM of Retail CX Automation at Capacity, and is now building a stealth venture focused on agentic commerce for restricted wallets.
Elucidata is a TechBio company building Polly, a data-centric ML-Ops platform that harmonizes messy biomedical data into AI-ready datasets for pharma R&D. Founded in 2015 by Abhishek Jha and Swetabh Pathak, the company powers drug discovery work at Pfizer, Genentech, Janssen and dozens of biotechs from offices in San Francisco, Boston and Delhi.
Abhishek Jha is the Co-Founder and CEO of Elucidata, a San Francisco-based AI company making biomedical data AI-ready for drug discovery and pharmaceutical R&D. A trained physical chemist with a PhD from the University of Chicago and postdoctoral work at MIT, he spent years at Agios Pharmaceuticals contributing to four FDA-approved first-in-class therapies before co-founding Elucidata in 2015. Under his leadership, the company has raised over $22.7M in funding, grown to 170 employees, and achieved $22.2M ARR, while evolving from a data-curation platform into an AI company solving out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in biomedical research - work that earned Elucidata recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2024.
J. Seth Strattan, PhD is a General Partner at Two Bear Capital, a Whitefish, Montana-based venture capital firm investing at the crossroads of life sciences and technology. With a PhD in Structural Biology and a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University, Strattan spent years at Stanford building and leading the engineering and data science teams behind landmark genomics consortia - ENCODE, the Human Cell Atlas, and the International Human Epigenomics Consortium - before pivoting to back the founders tackling biology's hardest problems. He is based in Silicon Valley, leads Two Bear Capital's Menlo Park office, and splits his remaining time between Montana and a family farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky.
Dan Riskin is a physician-entrepreneur, trauma surgeon, and healthcare AI executive who founded Verantos in 2015 to generate high-validity real-world evidence from messy clinical data. A serial innovator who began coding at age 5 and sold software at 12, Riskin holds an MD from Boston University and an MBA from MIT, is board-certified in four specialties, and serves as Clinical Professor of Surgery at Stanford. His prior company Health Fidelity was acquired for more than $150 million. Today, Verantos powers regulatory and reimbursement decisions for major pharmaceutical companies by turning fragmented EHR data into research-grade evidence at scale.
Dr. Gauri Naik is a Ph.D. biotechnologist, serial entrepreneur, and Co-Founder & CEO of OptraHEALTH, a Silicon Valley AI health-tech company building conversational AI and revenue cycle automation tools for genetics, genomics, and clinical workflows. With 11 U.S. patents, a career spanning digital pathology (BioImagene, acquired by Roche), and products deployed at leading health systems across the US, Europe, and Asia, she sits at the intersection of molecular biology, machine learning, and enterprise health IT.
Yongwei Zhang is the CEO of Complete Genomics and MGI Americas, leading one of the most ambitious efforts to make whole-genome sequencing fast, accurate, and affordable at scale. With a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins and dual bachelor's degrees from Tsinghua University, Zhang brings a rare blend of optics precision, software fluency, and entrepreneurial grit to the genomics frontier. He architected the DNBSEQ sequencing platform series now used by over 2,600 researchers in 100 countries, and has positioned Complete Genomics as a formidable challenger to Illumina's market dominance - at a fraction of the cost.
Francisco Leport is the co-founder and CEO of Gordian Biotechnology, a South San Francisco-based company pioneering high-throughput in vivo drug discovery for age-related diseases. Trained as a physicist at Stanford, Leport pivoted from particle physics and energy tech into biotech, driven by a lifelong fascination with longevity sparked by his mother's fruit fly research. Gordian's signature 'mosaic screening' platform uses gene therapy vectors and single-cell RNA sequencing to test hundreds of therapies simultaneously in single animal models, with an AI system called Pythia scoring results against human disease signatures - achieving 80% accuracy in predicting clinical outcomes. The company raised a $60M Series A in April 2024, backed by Founders Fund, Gigafund, and The Longevity Fund, and in early 2026 announced a research collaboration with Pfizer to accelerate obesity drug discovery.
Scott Clark is the Co-founder and CEO of Distributional, an enterprise AI testing platform that helps companies identify behavioral drift and unknown failures in AI systems. A triple-degree graduate of Oregon State University with a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell, he co-founded and sold SigOpt (a Bayesian optimization platform backed by Y Combinator and a16z) to Intel in 2020, then led 200 engineers as VP & GM of AI/HPC Supercomputing at Intel before founding Distributional in September 2023. The company raised $30M in under a year, including a $19M Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures in October 2024.
Peyton Greenside is the CEO and co-founder of BigHat Biosciences, a San Mateo-based biotech company she co-founded in 2019 with Mark DePristo. A pioneer of deep learning applied to life science, Greenside combined a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford, an MPhil from Cambridge, and a BA in Applied Math from Harvard into a singular mission: use machine learning and synthetic biology to design safer, more effective antibody therapeutics faster than anyone thought possible. BigHat's Milliner platform generates thousands of unique antibody designs per week, and the company has raised $174M in total funding with pharma partnerships spanning Amgen, Merck, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, and Eli Lilly.