diagnostics
(25)
Russ Lebovitz
Russ Lebovitz is the co-founder and CEO of Amprion, a precision brain diagnostics company that built the first commercial seed amplification assay for detecting misfolded alpha-synuclein - the protein at the root of Parkinson's disease and other synucleinopathies. An MD/PhD trained at Washington University in St. Louis and a former research physician at Baylor and Fox Chase Cancer Center, Lebovitz spent years chasing prions after the mad cow scare, then pivoted the same detection science toward common neurodegenerative diseases. His SYNTap test won an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and is now used in clinical trials and patient care to spot brain disease years before symptoms appear.
Sasan Amini
Sasan Amini is the co-founder and CEO of Clear Labs, a San Carlos genomics company that turns next-generation DNA sequencing into a push-button diagnostic for food safety and infectious disease. An Iranian immigrant who left Tehran at 22, he earned a PhD in genomics at Princeton, worked in advanced research at Illumina, and in 2014 set out to make sequencing simple enough for any lab to run. When COVID-19 hit, Clear Labs pivoted its automated platform into SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and reached more than half of U.S. public health labs.
Sheena Menezes
Sheena Menezes is the co-founder and CEO of Simple HealthKit, a Milpitas, California digital health company delivering accurate, affordable at-home diagnostics, treatment, and follow-up care. A biochemist with a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, where she discovered a novel tRNA methylase, she built her career in in-vitro diagnostics before founding Simple HealthKit to close socioeconomic gaps in healthcare access. Born and raised in Kuwait with Indian-Portuguese roots, she has been recognized by Fierce Healthcare as one of its Most Influential Minority Executives in Healthcare and named to Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders 500.
David Stein
David Stein is the co-founder and CEO of Ash (formerly Ash Wellness), a New York-based B2B platform that lets healthcare organizations run their own at-home testing programs. He launched the company out of Cornell Tech's MBA program in 2019 after a frustrating personal experience getting sexual health testing, first building a direct-to-consumer brand for the LGBTQ+ community and then pivoting to white-label infrastructure for providers and payers during COVID-19. Today Ash handles kit design, a CLIA/CAP-certified lab network, logistics, and patient-facing software across all 50 states, and has shipped more than a million test kits.
Eric Gornstein
Eric Gornstein is the Chief Executive Officer of Pearl Diagnostics, a Johns Hopkins spinout in Baltimore that makes MycoMEIA, the first FDA-cleared urine test for invasive aspergillosis. A biopharma commercialization veteran with more than 25 years leading product launches, partnering and deal-making across therapeutic areas, he joined Pearl in late 2025 to take the company from FDA clearance to the market and into Europe. Earlier he helped launch Radius Health's first product, Tymlos, and worked in business development and cell therapy partnerships at companies including bit.bio and Talaris Therapeutics.
Feng Xuan
Feng Xuan is a Boston-based scientist-entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Spear Bio, a biotechnology company building ultra-sensitive immunoassays for protein research and early disease diagnostics. He invented the company's core SPEAR (Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction) technology as a Technology Development Fellow at Harvard's Wyss Institute, translating a decade of research in molecular and immuno-diagnostics into a platform that can measure minute quantities of protein biomarkers from sub-microliter samples. Under his leadership, Spear Bio raised an oversubscribed $45 million Series A in 2024 and earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for a blood-based pTau 217 test aimed at early Alzheimer's disease detection.
Niamh O'Hara
Niamh O'Hara is the co-founder and CEO of Biotia, a New York healthtech company that pairs next-generation DNA sequencing with AI to identify pathogens causing hard-to-diagnose infections. An evolutionary biologist by training, she spun the company out of Cornell Tech with Weill Cornell geneticist Christopher Mason, runs a CLIA-certified metagenomics lab in Long Island City, and is building what she calls a global microbial sequence database to catch outbreaks before they spread.
Brianna Wronko-Stevens
Brianna Wronko-Stevens is a University of Pennsylvania-trained bioengineer who turned a senior design project into HueDx (formerly Group K Diagnostics), a Philadelphia diagnostics company that reads lab-grade results off a color-changing card and a smartphone camera - no lab, no reader, no waiting days. Inspired by an HIV clinic internship at 17, she built a platform to deliver fast, quantitative results to the patients who can least afford to wait. She founded the company in 2017, served as CEO through a 2023 rebrand and raised millions in funding, then stepped into the Chief Scientific Officer seat to focus on the science.
Hiranjith H
Hiranjith H (also Hiranjith GH) is the Chief Business Officer of Algorithmic Biologics, a Bengaluru-founded deeptech startup that embeds algorithms inside test tubes to make molecular testing dramatically cheaper and faster. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he leads the company's commercial operations and US expansion. He spent more than a decade scaling MedGenome's research-services business in the US and earlier built commercialization and analytics strategy for life-sciences clients at Novartis, ZS Associates, and Accenture Management Consulting.
Bob Wassman
Dr. E. Robert (Bob) Wassman is Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President of Clinical Development at MARAbio, a Utah-based diagnostics company building a maternal blood test to identify an autoimmune subtype of autism. A board-certified pediatrician and medical geneticist with more than 40 years in the field, he has served as chief medical officer for a long roster of genetic-testing pioneers including Genzyme Genetics, Ambry Genetics, Rosetta Genomics and Good Start Genetics, repeatedly turning frontier laboratory technology into clinical service across reproductive medicine, cancer, and neurodevelopmental disability.
Charles R. Bridges
Charles R. Bridges, M.D., Sc.D., is Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at CorVista Health, where he leads the science behind a machine-learning cardiac diagnostic platform. A cardiac surgeon turned engineer-executive, he holds an A.B. in applied physics from Harvard, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School (which he entered at 18), and both an M.S. in electrical engineering and a D.Sc. in chemical engineering from MIT. He was the first African American full professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, served as a technology chief at Johnson & Johnson's Janssen, and in 2022 was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. His record spans 175 peer-reviewed publications, 15 patents, and more than $10 million in continuous NIH funding.
Fred Turner
Fred Turner is the founder and CEO of Curative, a health-insurance company built on the radical premise of no copays, no deductibles, and no cost-sharing for in-network care. A British biochemist who dropped out of Oxford, he won the UK's Young Engineer of the Year at 17 for building a PCR machine to study his brother's red hair, founded cattle-genetics and diagnostics startups, then pivoted Curative into one of the largest COVID-19 testing providers in the United States before reinventing it as a health plan. He says his goal is to put his own company out of business by keeping members healthy.
Linh Hoang
Linh Hoang, MD, PhD, is the Chief Executive Officer of HistoWiz, the New York based digital pathology company building PathologyMap, a platform that automates histology and connects researchers to top pathologists on demand. A physician-scientist turned operator, he trained at the University of Pennsylvania, cut his teeth at Boston Consulting Group, and ran businesses at Thermo Fisher and PerkinElmer before leading two diagnostics companies as CEO, Boston Microfluidics and its successor Weavr Health, ahead of joining HistoWiz in October 2022.
Luca Springer
Luca Springer is the co-founder and CEO of Numen (formerly Cleancard), a San Francisco synthetic-biology company building rapid at-home diagnostic tests that read biomarkers from a urine sample in about 30 minutes. A 2016 German Rhodes Scholar who once planned a career in European politics, he traded the policy track for the lab bench, pairing degrees in computer science and global governance from Oxford with a dual BA from Columbia and Sciences Po. He started the company in 2021 with fellow Rhodes Scholar Thomas Carroll, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, and has raised roughly $5.1M to make lab-grade screening as simple as a pregnancy test.
Mohan Purushothaman
Mohan Purushothaman is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Progentec Diagnostics, an Oklahoma City company building blood tests and digital tools that aim to predict autoimmune disease flares before they happen. He came to diagnostics by an unusual route: a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. focused on pharmaceutical pricing, a Harvard research fellowship, five years inside Roche, and a pricing-software practice he built and sold to Alliance Life Sciences. In 2014 he turned that commercial instinct toward lupus, partnering with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, and in 2020 raised a $5M Series A led by Plains Venture Partners to bring the aiSLE DX flare-prediction platform and the LupusCorner patient community to market.
Robert Weigle
Robert K. Weigle is a medical device and diagnostics executive with more than 25 years of experience taking healthcare products from pre-clinical research to commercial launch. He is CEO of NOW Diagnostics, an independent board member of Tenon Medical, and a former entrepreneur-in-residence at DigitalDx Ventures. He led Benvenue Medical as CEO for over a decade, raising more than $200 million and launching spine devices in two markets, and later ran saliva-based diagnostics companies focused on cancer detection. His career spans Fortune 500 names like Johnson & Johnson and Baxter as well as a string of venture-backed startups.
Valerie Daggett
Valerie Daggett is a University of Washington bioengineering professor turned biotech founder who spent three decades running the world's largest collection of protein-folding simulations, stumbled onto a structure nature was not supposed to make, and built a company around it. As founder and CEO of Seattle-based AltPep, she is commercializing the alpha-sheet: a strange protein geometry her lab predicted on a computer before anyone confirmed it in a test tube. Her SOBA-AD blood test, which spots toxic amyloid oligomers years before symptoms, earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and put her at the front of the race to catch Alzheimer's early.
Tom Schoenherr
Tom Schoenherr is CEO of Diagnostics at Tempus AI, the publicly traded precision-medicine company. He previously ran Ambry Genetics as CEO from 2021 to 2025, steering it through a definitive agreement to be acquired by Tempus. He has spent more than 25 years inside molecular diagnostics, with prior leadership stints at Counsyl, Quest Diagnostics, Siemens Healthcare, Abbott Diagnostics, and Omada Health.
Julián Ríos Cantú
Julián Ríos Cantú is the co-founder and CEO of Eden, the leading cloud-native radiology operating system in Latin America. Motivated by his mother's battle with breast cancer, he began building health technology at age 16, went on to become the youngest-ever winner of the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards at 18, earned a Thiel Fellowship, and went through Y Combinator in 2018. Today, Eden processes over 13 million diagnostic studies annually across 18 countries for more than 2,200 medical institutions, backed by Sierra Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kaszek, and notable angel investors including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher, and Tony Robbins.
Beckie Robertson
Beckie Robertson is co-founder and general partner at Versant Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm focused on biotechnology and drug discovery. A chemical engineer by training, she has spent decades backing early-stage medical device and diagnostics companies, with prior operating roles at Chiron Diagnostics, Lifescan, and Egis. She currently serves as vice chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees and was awarded the Cornell Duffield Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award in April 2026.
Zack Scott
Zack Scott is a General Partner and Co-Head of the Healthcare Investment Team at Norwest Venture Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most active multi-stage venture capital firms. A rare combination of clinically trained physician and seasoned investor, Scott brings an MD from UT Health San Antonio and an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business to a career that spans surgical residency, healthcare venture investing at Burrill & Company, co-founding Revelation Partners (a healthcare-focused secondary investment firm), and now leading healthcare deals at Norwest. His portfolio includes companies like ShiraTronics, SetPoint Medical, Cytovale, and Galvanize Therapeutics, with notable exits including Omada Health's IPO and acquisitions by Stryker, Zoll Medical, Abbott, and Olympus.
Kim Kelderman
Kim Kelderman is the President and CEO of Bio-Techne Corporation, a global life science tools and diagnostics company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With over 30 years of healthcare and life sciences experience, Kelderman rose through the ranks at Bio-Techne after joining in 2018 to lead the Diagnostics and Genomics segment, where he doubled the spatial biology business and commercialized the ExoDx Prostate test. A native of the Netherlands educated at Hogeschool Heerlen and Columbia Business School, he previously held executive roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific and Becton Dickinson. He became CEO on February 1, 2024, succeeding Chuck Kummeth.
Alec Ford
Alec Ford is the chief executive of Karius, a Redwood City genomics-diagnostics company that reads microbial cell-free DNA from a single tube of blood to identify more than a thousand pathogens. He took the job in October 2020 and led the company through a $100M Series C in May 2024.
Andrew Quong
Andrew Quong is President and CEO of InterVenn Biosciences, a South San Francisco-based precision diagnostics company unlocking the human glycoproteome through AI-powered platforms. With a PhD in Physics and over 30 years spanning national laboratories, academia, and biotech, Quong bridges the physical and computational sciences with clinical medicine. He led InterVenn's development of GlycoKnow Ovarian, a non-invasive blood-based liquid biopsy test for distinguishing ovarian cancer from benign masses, and has steered the company through key commercialization milestones including a $201M Series C raise in 2021.
Trevor Martin
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.