digital-pathology
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Dan Roark Has Spent a Career Teaching Science to Move Faster
From drug-discovery robots to digital pathology, the Spokane founder keeps returning to the same stubborn problem: brilliant science trapped inside slow systems.
Eric Feinstein
Eric Feinstein is the President and CEO of Clarapath, a Hawthorne, New York medical robotics company automating one of the last manual corners of the pathology lab: cutting and mounting tissue for diagnosis. Under his leadership Clarapath built SectionStar, an FDA-registered robotic microtomy platform, acquired the digital-pathology software firm Crosscope, forged a research collaboration with Mayo Clinic, and closed a $36M Series B in 2024. A former medical-device investor and operator with an MBA from Cornell, Feinstein frames the histology lab as a Lean Six Sigma manufacturing operation and pitches a broader vision he calls Laboratory 2.0.
Jan Witowski
Jan Witowski is the co-founder and CEO of Ataraxis AI, a New York precision-medicine company building AI models that read cancer tissue to predict how a patient's disease will behave and which treatments will help. A physician-scientist with an MD and PhD, he spent a decade in medical imaging research at Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and NYU Langone before spinning Ataraxis out of NYU in 2023. The company's first product, Ataraxis Breast, is billed as the first AI-native prognostic and predictive test for breast cancer, and it raised a $20.4 million Series A in 2025 led by AIX Ventures.
Rohit Hiwale
Rohit Hiwale is the co-founder and CEO of Morphle Labs, a Y Combinator W20 deep-tech company building robotic microtomes and high-throughput whole slide scanners for digital pathology. An IIT Kharagpur computer science graduate and second-time founder with prior engineering stints at Yahoo, WalmartLabs and Rippling, he is trying to automate the physical and imaging bottlenecks at the core of cancer diagnostics.
Dirk Soenksen
Dirk Soenksen is the co-founder and CEO of Ceresti Health, a Carlsbad, California digital-health company that treats the family caregiver as the unit of care for people living with dementia. An engineer by training, he first reshaped a corner of medicine by founding Aperio, the company that turned the glass microscope slide into a digital image and became the global leader in digital pathology before Danaher's Leica Biosystems acquired it in 2012. A coffee on his last day at Leica sent him into a second act: instead of imaging the brain, he set out to support the overwhelmed spouses and adult children caring for it.
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.
Gauri Naik
Dr. Gauri Naik is a Ph.D. biotechnologist, serial entrepreneur, and Co-Founder & CEO of OptraHEALTH, a Silicon Valley AI health-tech company building conversational AI and revenue cycle automation tools for genetics, genomics, and clinical workflows. With 11 U.S. patents, a career spanning digital pathology (BioImagene, acquired by Roche), and products deployed at leading health systems across the US, Europe, and Asia, she sits at the intersection of molecular biology, machine learning, and enterprise health IT.
Anirudh Joshi
Anirudh Joshi is the co-founder and CEO of Valar Labs, a Palo Alto-based AI oncology company building tools that let doctors predict whether a specific cancer treatment will work before a patient wastes months on the wrong one. A biomedical engineer trained at Georgia Tech and Stanford, he previously built AI at Microsoft, PathAI, and Curai before co-founding Valar in 2021 with teammates from Stanford's AI in Medicine group. Valar raised $26M total, landing a $22M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and DCVC in 2024, and its flagship test Vesta — predicting BCG therapy response in bladder cancer — is now live at 20 U.S. hospitals. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare 2025.
Andre Esteva
Andre Esteva, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of ArteraAI, a medical AI company whose test for personalizing prostate cancer therapy is included in NCCN clinical guidelines, reimbursed by Medicare, and deployed internationally. A Stanford-trained AI scientist whose Nature cover paper first demonstrated that AI could match dermatologists at diagnosing skin cancer, Esteva has co-founded four companies with a combined market cap of $2.2B. Named to TIME100 Health 2025 and Modern Healthcare's 40 Under 40 for 2025, he leads a company that raised $175M total and was named a TIME 2024 Best Invention.