Zag Bio is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology startup pioneering thymus-targeted medicines for autoimmune disease. Founded and incubated by Polaris Partners and launched in October 2025 with an $80M Series A, the company designs bifunctional antibodies that ferry self-antigens directly into the thymus - the organ that trains immune cells - to re-teach the body to tolerate its own tissue rather than attack it. Its lead program, ZAG-101, aims to prevent or delay Type 1 diabetes by inducing durable, antigen-specific central tolerance instead of broad immunosuppression.
Acceleron Fusion is a Cambridge, Massachusetts deep-tech company reviving muon-catalyzed fusion, a phenomenon first observed in the 1950s, as a path to abundant clean energy. Instead of confining a 100-million-degree plasma, Acceleron fires a beam of muons - subatomic particles roughly 200 times heavier than electrons - at highly compressed deuterium-tritium fuel, triggering fusion at temperatures closer to 500-1,000 C. Founded in 2023 by NK Labs veterans Ara Knaian and Seth Newburg and backed by a $24M Series A from Lowercarbon Capital and Collaborative Fund, the company is building two core technologies: a high-efficiency muon source and a high-density fusion cell, with the goal of a fusion power plant that beats natural gas on cost.
DARVIS is a health-tech company that uses AI-powered computer vision to give hospitals real-time visibility into their supply rooms. Its flagship product, Digital Shelves, uses smart PTZ cameras to continuously monitor inventory fill-levels and scan barcodes automatically, replacing manual counting with live consumption data, predictive demand planning, and automated reordering. Born in the gaming industry in 2015, the company pivoted to healthcare supply chain and now serves systems such as MD Anderson Cancer Center while operating from Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a hub in Hamburg, Germany, and a presence in Houston, Texas.
Jobcase is a Cambridge-based social platform built for the workers most job sites overlook - hourly, frontline and blue-collar Americans. With more than 110 million registered members and roughly 20 million monthly actives, it pairs a community forum and resume tools with machine-learning job matching, earning rankings among the largest U.S. online career destinations. Founded by Fred Goff and Tony Deigh out of the wreckage of an AI hedge fund, Jobcase makes money from employer advertising and recruiting partnerships while keeping the core product free for job seekers.
Metrika is a Cambridge, Massachusetts SaaS company that built the first operational intelligence and risk management platform for blockchains and digital assets. It collects, analyzes, and visualizes the health of decentralized networks in real time - tracking hundreds of risk indicators across protocols, smart contracts, and market conditions - so that protocol teams, financial institutions, and regulators can monitor performance, detect issues early, and meet compliance obligations.
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.
Axoft is a Cambridge, Massachusetts neurotechnology company building implantable brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) out of Fleuron, a proprietary material it claims is up to 10,000x softer than the polyimide used in conventional brain implants. By making electronics roughly as soft as brain tissue, Axoft aims to keep thousands of sensors in stable contact with single neurons for years instead of months - reducing scarring and signal loss - to diagnose and eventually treat disorders of consciousness, paralysis, and other neurological conditions. A Harvard spinout founded in 2021, it raised an oversubscribed $55M Series A in April 2026 and has run first-in-human studies in 11+ patients worldwide.
Russell Beckerman is a biotech entrepreneur and Co-Founder & CEO of Overture Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based company engineering precision antibody medicines targeting obesity and metabolic dysfunction. He previously co-founded 82VS, a venture studio embedded within Alloy Therapeutics that has launched nine drug companies since 2020. His work sits at the intersection of cutting-edge antibody biology, company creation, and the conviction that the next generation of obesity drugs will be antibodies - not peptides.
Yasir Al-Wakeel is a physician turned biotech operator who in September 2025 became CEO of Vesalius Therapeutics and a CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering. Trained as a doctor at Oxford with a theology degree from Cambridge, he spent a decade structuring more than $30 billion in life-science deals before running finance and strategy at companies like Merrimack, Neon Therapeutics and Kronos Bio. At Vesalius he is betting that many common diseases are actually clusters of genetically distinct conditions waiting to be redefined.
Yoyo Chang is the Taiwan-born British founder and CEO of Kody, a payments and physical-commerce platform he started as a high-school cafeteria project to kill lunch queues. A self-taught teenage stock trader who ploughed his own trading profits into the company, he raised the business through a $20M Series A in 2024 and pushed its annualised processing volume toward $1 billion, all before turning 25.
Daniel First is the founder and CEO of Axion (Axion Ray), an AI-powered quality intelligence platform that helps manufacturers detect, investigate, and resolve product issues before they reach customers. After watching enterprise AI pilots stall at analysis rather than action during his years at McKinsey and QuantumBlack, he built Axion to put AI directly in the hands of field engineers across aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and consumer goods. The New York company has raised $25M total, including a $17.5M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners with RTX Ventures, and counts Boeing, Cummins, Baxter, DENSO, Newell, and Pratt & Whitney among its customers.
Paul Le Floch is the co-founder and CEO of Axoft, a Cambridge neurotechnology company building brain implants out of a material so soft it behaves like brain tissue. A Harvard-trained materials scientist and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he bet that the way to read the brain better was not to borrow chips from the semiconductor industry but to invent a new material from scratch. The result, Fleuron, is up to thousands of times softer than conventional probes yet can carry over 1,000 sensors. Axoft has now implanted its device in 11 patients and raised a $55M Series A to push toward FDA trials.
Ravi Pappu is the founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building low-cost autonomous robots that drift through the water column to measure the ocean at a scale never attempted. A physicist-turned-serial-founder, he invented Physical Unclonable Functions during his MIT PhD, co-founded the RFID pioneer ThingMagic (acquired by Trimble), and served as CTO of the CIA-linked venture firm In-Q-Tel before deciding the subsurface ocean was the hardest, most under-measured place on Earth and going after it with hardware he calls 'the CubeSat for the ocean.'
Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, where she co-directs the Bennett Institute and spends her days arguing that the numbers we use to run the economy are quietly out of date. A former economics editor at The Independent turned academic, she has written ten books, including the surprise hit GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History and her 2025 work The Measure of Progress. She has helped shape UK competition policy, sat on the BBC Trust, advised the Competition and Markets Authority, and was made a Dame in 2023 for services to economics.
Adnan Iqbal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Luma Health, a San Mateo-based healthcare technology company that has built an AI-native Patient Success Platform used by 750+ healthcare organizations, 100 million patients, and 500,000+ providers. A second-generation Pakistani-American and serial entrepreneur, Iqbal studied environmental biology at UC Berkeley, earned an MPhil in BioScience from Cambridge University, and an MS/MBA from Stanford GSB. Before Luma, he spent five years in management at Genentech and co-founded AutoTB, a tuberculosis diagnostic startup that won both Cambridge and UC Berkeley entrepreneurship competitions. Luma Health has raised $160 million in funding and enabled $3.2 billion in healthcare revenue.
Emily Gittins is the Co-founder and CEO of Archive, a B2B SaaS platform that powers branded resale programs for 50+ global fashion companies including The North Face, New Balance, and Oscar de la Renta. A Cambridge mathematics graduate turned Stanford MBA, Gittins built Archive after stints at BCG, Google X, and the Global Fashion Agenda, channeling her technical background and sustainability conviction into a company that has raised $76.9M - including a $30M Series B in February 2025 - and been named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2024.
Nikola Mrkšić is the co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, a voice AI company building enterprise-grade conversational agents that handle customer service calls so naturally that callers sometimes apologize mid-sentence for being rude to what they assume is a person. Born in Belgrade in 1991, Mrkšić earned a full scholarship to Cambridge, completed a PhD on spoken dialogue systems, co-built VocalIQ before Apple acquired it, and then founded PolyAI in 2017 with two Cambridge lab colleagues. The company has raised $206M across four rounds - most recently an $86M Series D in December 2025 at a $750M valuation - and its voice agents now handle calls for Marriott, FedEx, Caesars Entertainment, and over 200 enterprise customers across 45+ languages in 25+ countries.
British-Pakistani former NHS doctor turned creator-entrepreneur. Ali Abdaal hosts the Deep Dive podcast, runs the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, and wrote the New York Times bestseller Feel-Good Productivity, which has been translated into 35+ languages.
Julie Grant is a General Partner at Canaan, a $5B technology and healthcare venture capital firm, where she leads biopharma investments and company formation on the West Coast. She co-founded and served as founding CEO of Day One Biopharmaceuticals, a purpose-built pediatric oncology company that grew to a $1.5B+ valuation and was later acquired by Servier. A Yale-educated molecular biophysicist who went on to Stanford MBA and Cambridge MPhil, Grant brings rare operational depth to venture - having sat in the CEO chair before returning to investing. In 2023, President Biden appointed her to the National Cancer Advisory Board. She is the fourth woman to become a General Partner at Canaan.
Khaled Nasr is a General Partner and Chief Operating Officer at InterWest Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture capital firm with over 40 years of history investing in healthcare and information technology. A Cambridge-educated mathematician turned Silicon Valley dealmaker, Nasr joined InterWest's IT team in 2005 and became COO in 2016, overseeing all financial, fundraising, investor relations, and administrative operations. Before InterWest, he spent 16 years in networking and telecom startups - including stints as CEO of FlowWise Networks and COO of Advanced Computer Communications - then made the jump to venture investing at Alta Partners. Born and raised in Lebanon, Nasr co-founded LebNet and is a charter member of TechWadi, bridging Silicon Valley capital with Arab and MENA entrepreneurs. In January 2026, he published 'Rule Arbitrage,' a book on evading regulatory, tax, and accounting rules.
Sandy Macrae is a Scottish physician-scientist who has led Sangamo Therapeutics, the Brisbane, California gene-editing pioneer, as President and CEO since June 2016. Trained at Glasgow and Cambridge - where Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner supervised his PhD - he ran emerging-markets R&D at GSK and was Global Medical Officer at Takeda before staking his career on zinc finger technology and genomic medicines for rare and neurological diseases.
Josh Lehrer is a physician-scientist and biotech executive serving as CEO of Marea Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company harnessing human genetics to develop first-in-class medicines for cardiometabolic diseases. A cardiologist by training with degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and UCSF, Lehrer brings over two decades of drug development experience spanning Genentech, Global Blood Therapeutics (where he oversaw the FDA approval of Oxbryta for sickle cell disease), and Graphite Bio. At Marea, he has led the company from a Third Rock Ventures incubation to a $190 million-funded enterprise with two clinical-stage programs showing strong early efficacy data, including a 53% reduction in remnant cholesterol with MAR001 published in The Lancet.
Manik Suri is the Founder & CEO of GlacierGrid (formerly Therma), a San Francisco-based climate tech company that uses AI, IoT sensors, and intelligent controls to cut energy waste from refrigeration and cooling systems - responsible for nearly 10% of global emissions. A Harvard and Cambridge alumnus who once worked at D.E. Shaw and the White House National Economic Council, Suri pivoted from policy and finance to build tech that keeps food cold, businesses profitable, and the planet a degree cooler. GlacierGrid counts McDonald's, 7-Eleven, Domino's, and Marriott among its clients, has raised over $29 million in funding, and was named one of TIME's America's Top GreenTech Companies for 2025.
Chris Mansi is a Cambridge and UCL-trained neurosurgeon turned AI entrepreneur, and the Co-founder and CEO of Viz.ai - the company that puts an AI brain between a CT scanner and a surgeon so that patients who are about to die of a stroke stop dying from delays. Named to TIME100 AI in 2024, Mansi built Viz.ai from a Stanford dorm-room insight into a platform covering nearly 2,000 U.S. hospitals and 230 million lives, reducing stroke diagnostic timelines by more than an hour - one patient at a time, every ten seconds.
Matan Grinberg is the CEO and Co-Founder of Factory, an AI platform that deploys autonomous agents called Droids to automate the entire software development lifecycle. A theoretical physicist who dropped out of his UC Berkeley PhD program in 2023 after a fateful three-hour walk with Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, Grinberg built Factory from a 72-hour hackathon demo into a $1.5B unicorn backed by Khosla Ventures, Sequoia, Blackstone, and Insight Partners. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 AI in 2025, he is one of the defining voices in the agent-native development movement.
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.
Ankit Gupta is a General Partner at Y Combinator, bringing a rare fusion of academic machine learning research, startup founding, and biotech industry leadership. He co-founded Reverie Labs (YC W18), an AI-driven drug discovery company that raised $31M and was acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks in 2024. A Harvard magna cum laude CS grad who taught three courses and won three Derek Bok Awards, Ankit now helps the next generation of founders navigate the same inflection points he once faced.
Gregory L. Verdine is a Harvard-trained chemical biologist who coined the phrase 'drugging the undruggable' and built an empire around it. The Erving Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, he co-invented stapled peptides, pioneered the field of chemical biology, and founded or co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies - several of which reached the Nasdaq and three of which produced FDA-approved drugs. In July 2023 he joined Andreessen Horowitz as a Venture Partner on the Bio + Health team, bringing his rare combination of deep scientific discovery, serial entrepreneurship, and capital deployment to one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms.
Grey Baker is a Cambridge-educated mathematician turned software entrepreneur best known for bootstrapping Dependabot to $14k MRR before selling it to GitHub in 2019, then growing GitHub Advanced Security to $140M ARR. A former McKinsey consultant who taught himself to code in six months, cycled 30,000km around the world between startups, and co-founded YC S23 company Pincites (AI contract negotiation, acquired by Filevine in 2025), he now serves as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator.
Astasia Myers is a General Partner at Felicis, a 10x Forbes Midas list honoree, and 4x New York Times Top 20 VC who invests in early-stage AI, infrastructure, and developer tools companies. She previously founded Quiet Capital's enterprise practice, backing Modal, Chroma, and Langchain, and led investments in unicorns like LaunchDarkly at Redpoint Ventures. With dual degrees from Stanford and a master's from Cambridge, she's partnered with 10 unicorns and achieved 9 IPOs, bringing over a decade of enterprise software experience from startups, equity research at Baird, and Cisco's corporate development team.