Moonwalk Biosciences is a San Francisco Bay Area biotech building precision epigenetic medicines. Co-founded by former Illumina CTO Alex Aravanis and CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, the company pairs whole-genome, single-cell epigenome mapping with AI-guided 'read-and-write' epigenetic editing tools that reprogram cells to a healthy state without cutting or altering the underlying DNA. Launched out of stealth in January 2024 with $57 million in seed and Series A funding, Moonwalk aims to file its first IND within a few years.
Multispan, Inc. is a Hayward, California biotech that builds the cell lines and assays drug hunters use to interrogate G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), the largest druggable target family in the human genome. Founded in 2004 by Helena Mancebo, the company has assembled one of the industry's largest libraries of clonally derived, GPCR-expressing stable cell lines - 600+ lines and 2,000+ ready-to-use reagents - and pairs them with custom assay development, compound profiling, antibody work, and CRISPR cell engineering. Its MULTISCREEN platform and proprietary HEx high-expression cell technology let pharmaceutical and academic teams screen, profile, and validate candidate drugs against receptors that are notoriously hard to express and measure.
Jennifer Bergheiser is the Chief Business Officer of eGenesis, the Cambridge biotech turning gene-edited pig organs into a real answer to the transplant waitlist. She runs corporate strategy and all portfolio and commercial development, drawing on more than two decades across big pharma, venture capital, and consulting. Her resume runs from screening deals at Domain Associates to steering the blockbuster autoimmune drug Stelara at Centocor/Johnson & Johnson. At eGenesis she helps commercialize one of medicine's boldest bets: organs grown in pigs, edited dozens of times over, transplanted into living humans.
Ken Drazan is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences (ArsenalBio), a South San Francisco clinical-stage company building computationally designed, programmable T-cell therapies to attack solid tumors. A board-certified liver transplant surgeon turned operator and investor, he previously was President and Chief Business Officer of GRAIL (acquired by Illumina), founded the robotic surgery company Verb Surgical (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), and co-founded the private equity firm Bertram Capital. At ArsenalBio he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and forged collaborations with Bristol Myers Squibb and Genentech, betting that gene-edited 'integrated circuit' T cells - and an AI foundation model of the T cell - can turn cell therapy into something curative for cancers that have resisted it.
Kytopen is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech and MIT spinout building Flowfect, a non-viral, continuous-flow platform that uses fluid flow plus electric fields to deliver mRNA, DNA and CRISPR payloads into cells. The technology aims to engineer hundreds of billions of cells in minutes, removing a major bottleneck in discovering, developing and manufacturing advanced cell therapies like CAR-T and NK-cell treatments.
Yuanyuan Xu is a structural biologist turned biotech founder who left the protein-crystallography bench at Tsinghua and Yale to build Cure Genetics (克睿基因), a Suzhou clinical-stage company chasing cell and gene therapies for solid tumors and genetic disease. She founded it in 2016, raised a $60M Series B in 2021, and bets on two homegrown platforms: an invariant-natural-killer-T cell therapy (AIMS CAR-NKT) and a directed-evolution engine for new AAV capsids (VELP).
Fabian Gerlinghaus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cellares, a South San Francisco biotech company building the world's first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. An aerospace engineer turned life-science entrepreneur, he co-founded Cellares in 2019 after spotting a critical gap: FDA-approved CAR-T therapies were sitting ready while patients died on waitlists because manufacturing couldn't scale. His Cell Shuttle platform — a fully automated, factory-in-a-box system processing 16 patient batches simultaneously — has attracted $630M in funding, a $380M partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb, and FDA's Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation. TIME magazine named it one of 2025's most important inventions.
Mammoth Biosciences is a Brisbane, California biotechnology company co-founded by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna that develops ultracompact CRISPR systems for both in vivo gene-editing therapeutics and rapid molecular diagnostics. Its proprietary toolbox of small Cas enzymes (including Cas14 and CasΦ) powers therapeutic partnerships with Regeneron, Vertex and Bayer, while the DETECTR platform brings CRISPR-based disease detection out of the central lab.
Profluent is an AI-first protein design company building frontier models that author novel proteins - including the first AI-designed CRISPR gene editor, OpenCRISPR-1. Based in Berkeley's biotech corridor, the company applies the same scaling-law playbook that worked for language models to the language of biology, then validates the outputs in a wet lab.
Rachel Haurwitz is the President and CEO of Caribou Biosciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company she co-founded in 2011 with Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and colleagues Martin Jinek and James Berger. A pioneer in CRISPR commercialization, Haurwitz earned her PhD from UC Berkeley under Doudna's mentorship — she was the first student in the lab to work on CRISPR — and pivoted from academia to industry to bring genome-editing technology to patients. Under her leadership, Caribou has developed a proprietary Cas12a-based platform (chRDNA technology) enabling precise, multiplex genome editing for off-the-shelf allogeneic CAR-T and CAR-NK cell therapies targeting blood cancers and autoimmune diseases. She also co-founded Intellia Therapeutics in 2014 and has been recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30, Fortune 40 Under 40, and featured in Walter Isaacson's bestseller 'The Code Breaker.'
Jacob Borrajo is the Founder and CEO of Amber Bio, a Cambridge-based biotech company pioneering a first-of-its-kind RNA writing platform capable of multi-kilobase edits. With a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT and research training at the Broad Institute, Borrajo has spent his career building at the intersection of CRISPR, machine learning, and synthetic biology. Amber Bio launched in August 2023 with a $26 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Playground Global, with strategic participation from Eli Lilly and the Retinal Degeneration Fund. His platform's key innovation: treating diseases with high allelic diversity using a single therapeutic product, by editing RNA rather than DNA - making gene therapy safer, reversible, and dramatically more scalable.
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.
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.
Trevor Martin is the co-founder and CEO of Mammoth Biosciences, the CRISPR company he built alongside Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and two of her graduate students. A Princeton-trained computational biologist who earned his PhD at Stanford, Martin turned a cold email to Doudna into a $465M-funded platform company developing ultracompact CRISPR systems - including NanoCas, the first efficient extrahepatic gene editor - aimed at permanently curing genetic diseases.
Jorge Conde is a General Partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he invests at the intersection of biology, computer science, and engineering. Born in Miami to Cuban and Peruvian parents, Conde co-founded Knome — the first company to offer whole-genome sequencing directly to consumers — alongside Harvard geneticist George Church, then spent years as CSO, CFO, and CPO at Syros Pharmaceuticals before joining a16z in 2017. An MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 and Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, he is one of the most prominent voices arguing that the 21st century belongs to biology the way the 20th belonged to physics.
Nessan Bermingham, Ph.D., is a serial biotech entrepreneur and Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures who has co-founded eight biotechnology companies including Intellia Therapeutics - one of the first public CRISPR gene editing companies - which he built from concept to IPO in under two years. A child of an Irish Army officer raised on a military base in Co. Kildare, he traded academia for Wall Street, Wall Street for venture capital, and venture capital for founding the companies reshaping genetic medicine. Today he shepherds a portfolio of cutting-edge biotech companies at Khosla Ventures while pursuing 155-mile ultra-marathons and aspiring to race at Dakar.
Thomas J. Cahill, MD, PhD is the founder and managing partner of Newpath Partners, a Boston-based life sciences venture firm he built from the ground up to translate breakthrough academic science into medicines. A structural biologist trained under two Nobel laureates, Cahill has co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies — including Prime Medicine, Chroma Medicine, and Autobahn Therapeutics — and became one of the pandemic's most consequential behind-the-scenes operators when he assembled Scientists to Stop COVID-19, a coalition that fed curated research directly to the White House and helped redirect Regeneron's manufacturing to Dublin.
Omri Amirav-Drory, Ph.D., is a General Partner at NFX leading NFX Bio, a pre-seed and seed venture fund focused on scientist-founders at the intersection of technology and biology. A former Fulbright Scholar and Stanford postdoc turned biotech entrepreneur, he co-founded Genome Compiler (acquired by Twist Bioscience), launched Tech.Bio, and now backs breakthrough life sciences companies while co-founding Renewal Bio - a longevity company building synthetic embryo-derived tissues to combat aging. His stated mission is ending involuntary death.