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PackGene and the art of making enough
A promising gene is only the beginning. PackGene sells the manufacturing, testing and practical know-how that help turn a laboratory idea into material a clinical trial can use.
Altasciences Bet the Drug Lab on One Idea: Fewer Handoffs, Faster Answers
The Montreal-area CRO escaped the commodity economics of generic-drug testing by stitching labs, clinics and manufacturing into one early-development platform. Its wager is simple: the science need not move recklessly for the program to move faster.
THREAD Moved the Clinical Trial to the Patient's Kitchen Table
For decades a clinical trial meant a patient driving to a site. THREAD bet the visit could come to them instead - and then bought four companies to prove it.
The French Startup That Turned "Just Test It" Into a Global Experiment
For sixteen years AB Tasty sold brands a simple idea: stop arguing about what works on your website and test it. In January 2026 it merged with its biggest rival to prove the point at scale.
How a Bought Domain and a Matt Damon Ad Built a 150-Million-User Crypto Empire
It bought one of the most valuable domains on the internet, put its name on a Los Angeles arena, and spent a decade with no outside investors. Then Citadel Securities showed up.
Sherpa
Sherpa is a San Francisco startup building an AI agent that makes websites improve themselves. It installs with a single line of code, studies how visitors behave, generates on-brand variants of pages and flows, runs A/B tests on live traffic, and ships the winners - all without a designer, developer, or analyst in the loop. Founded in 2026 by ex-Lindy engineers Ethan Kinnan and Norbu Sonam and backed by Y Combinator (Spring 2026 / P26 batch), Sherpa also optimizes sites for AI agents, tuning agent-facing pages so that assistants recommend a company more often. Early customers report 15-35% lifts in their primary conversion metric within the first 30-60 days.
Castor
Castor is a health-technology company that builds a cloud-based eClinical platform for running clinical trials - from electronic data capture (EDC) and eConsent to eCOA/ePRO and real-world evidence. Founded in 2012 in Amsterdam by physician-researcher Dr. Derk Arts, Castor set out to replace clunky, expensive trial software with a self-service, researcher-friendly system. Today it supports more than 15,000 studies across 90+ countries and is used by leading CROs and biopharma companies, while pushing decentralized trials and practical AI (Castor Catalyst, built with Google Cloud) into mainstream research.
HiRO - Harvest Integrated Research Organization
HiRO (Harvest Integrated Research Organization) is a full-service, globally oriented clinical research organization founded in 2020 that helps biotech companies run clinical trials across borders. Positioning itself as an 'integrated' rather than a traditional 'contract' research organization, HiRO connects Asian biotechs seeking trials outside their region with US and European sponsors wanting to run studies in Asia. Backed by a tens-of-millions-of-dollars Series A led by OrbiMed and built out through three CRO acquisitions, it offers end-to-end services from preclinical strategy to regulatory submission, with deep expertise in oncology and rare disease.
Cyagen Biosciences
Cyagen Biosciences is a life-sciences contract research organization that builds custom genetically engineered rodent models - knockout, knockin, conditional, and humanized mice and rats - for academic labs and drug developers. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with major operations in China, Japan, and Europe, Cyagen has grown into one of the world's largest suppliers of custom mouse and rat models, complemented by stem-cell products and a fast-growing gene-delivery arm, VectorBuilder, that designs and manufactures viral vectors from research through clinical CDMO work.
People Science
People Science is a Los Angeles clinical research organization that turns rigorous clinical trials into software. Its platform, Chloe, lets wellness and health brands design, launch, and run decentralized, IRB-approved studies entirely from participants' homes - integrating wearables, lab partners, and remote data collection so that supplements, nutraceuticals, cannabinoids, psychedelics, and food-as-medicine products can earn real clinical evidence at a fraction of the cost and time of a traditional CRO. Founded by MD-PhD co-CEOs Belinda Tan and Noah Craft, who previously built Science 37 into a billion-dollar clinical trials company, People Science aims to bring evidence to an industry long defined by claims.
Biorce
Biorce is a Barcelona-based healthtech company building AI-native infrastructure for clinical trials. Its core product, Aika, helps pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and CROs design regulator-ready trial protocols in roughly 90 seconds, drawing on a corpus of more than one million clinical studies and 260,000+ protocols. By cutting protocol design time by at least 50% and flagging regulatory and feasibility risks early, Biorce aims to compress the years and billions of dollars it takes to bring a drug to market - so treatments reach patients sooner. In February 2026 it closed a USD $52.5M Series A led by DST Global, the largest Series A to date in the Iberian healthtech and AI ecosystem.
ClinChoice
ClinChoice is a mid-size, global, full-service contract research organization (CRO) that helps pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, and consumer health companies run clinical trials and bring drugs and devices to market. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Horsham, Pennsylvania, the firm employs roughly 4,000 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, offering clinical development, biometrics, safety/pharmacovigilance, regulatory affairs, post-marketing real-world evidence, and technology services. After rebranding from Fountain Medical Development (FMD K&L) in 2020 and raising a $150M Series E in 2022, ClinChoice has grown through acquisitions to serve six of the top ten pharma companies while focusing on emerging and mid-size biotech innovators.
Alloy Therapeutics, Inc.
Alloy Therapeutics is a biotechnology ecosystem company that democratizes access to the tools, platforms, and expertise needed to discover and develop new drugs. Founded in 2017 by Errik Anderson and headquartered in the Boston area (Lexington, Massachusetts), Alloy gives more than 200 partners non-exclusive, affordable access to proprietary technologies - led by its royalty-free ATX-Gx transgenic-mouse antibody discovery platform - along with discovery services and a venture studio that builds new biotech companies. Its model is unusual: Alloy reinvests revenue into innovation and its controlling stock cannot be sold. In April 2026 the company raised a $40M Series E at a $1B valuation.