biology
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Cyrus Khajvandi
Cyrus Khajvandi is the co-founder and CEO of Humata, an Austin-based AI startup often described as 'ChatGPT for all your files.' A Stanford biology graduate and serial entrepreneur, he built Humata after struggling to keep up with scientific papers, turning that personal frustration into a tool that lets people ask questions of their documents and get cited, fact-checkable answers. The company launched in early 2023, grew to millions of users processing tens of millions of pages, and raised $3.5M led by Google's Gradient Ventures with ARK Invest and M13.
Ali Madani
Ali Madani is the founder and CEO of Profluent, the AI-first protein design company based in Emeryville, California. A machine learning researcher by training, he holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and pioneered the use of large language models to generate functional proteins from scratch - first at Salesforce AI Research as the architect of ProGen, then at Profluent where his team created OpenCRISPR-1, the world's first AI-designed and open-source gene editor, published in Nature in 2025. With $150M in total funding from Bezos Expeditions, Altimeter Capital, Spark Capital, and Insight Partners, Madani is on a mission to make biology programmable - designing proteins that don't exist in nature to solve the biggest challenges in human health, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.