life-sciences-ai
(9)
CellType
CellType is a Y Combinator W26 biotech startup building an 'agentic drug company' that simulates human biology to de-risk drug discovery. Founded by Yale professor David van Dijk and ML engineer Ivan Vrkic, it pairs Cell2Sentence, a 27-billion-parameter biological foundation model built with Google DeepMind, with AI agents that run the discovery pipeline from hypothesis to compound screening. The goal is to replace animal models and cell lines with computational simulations of human biology and cut preclinical failure rates.
David Lazerson
David Lazerson is the co-founder and CEO of Briya, a healthcare technology company that connects hospitals, research institutions, and life sciences organizations so they can share de-identified, real-world patient data securely and in compliance with U.S. and European privacy rules. A physicist and cognitive scientist by training and a former Israeli military cyber operations officer, Lazerson built Briya on cryptography, federated learning, and zero-knowledge proofs, and in 2025 launched Briya AIRE, a clinical-grade AI research assistant that lets researchers ask questions in plain language instead of writing code.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Dimitrios Skaltsas is the co-founder and CEO of Intelligencia AI, a New York enterprise software company that uses machine learning and curated biomedical data to estimate the probability that a drug candidate will win regulatory approval. Trained as a lawyer in Athens and London, he spent more than a decade at McKinsey, where he built and led New Ventures' big-data and AI work for pharmaceutical R&D before co-founding Intelligencia with Vangelis Vergetis in 2017. Under his leadership the company raised a Series A, was named one of Forbes's Top AI Companies to Watch, secured a U.S. patent for its probability-of-success assessments, and landed on the Inc. 5000. He is also an Executive in Residence at INSEAD.
Corvic AI
Corvic AI is a Mountain View startup building an Intelligence Composition Platform - the logic layer that turns messy, multi-structured enterprise data (PDFs, tables, sensor logs, images, time series) into reliable, production-ready AI outcomes without bespoke pipeline engineering. Founded in 2023 by engineers from Intel, Katana Graph, and Determined AI, it uses proprietary techniques like Mixture of Spaces embeddings and agentic, auditable orchestration to deliver explainable enterprise intelligence for manufacturing, industrial, financial services, and life sciences customers.
Delineate
Delineate is a Cambridge, Massachusetts AI company building agents that accelerate clinical trial design for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Its custom large language models and computer vision systems extract and structure data from thousands of research papers and patents - including numbers buried inside figures and plots - turning months of manual evidence aggregation into weeks. A Y Combinator Winter 2025 company founded in 2024 by an MIT PhD and an ex-Lockheed Skunkworks AI lead, Delineate works with two top-10 pharmaceutical companies and holds an NIH STTR grant with MIT.
Salt AI
Salt AI is a Los Angeles contextual-AI company building a visual platform that lets regulated enterprises - especially life sciences and healthcare teams - orchestrate many AI models into governed, auditable workflows that run inside their own infrastructure. Founded in 2023 by former Myspace CTO Aber Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto, Salt lets biochemists and clinicians drag, drop, and chain models like AlphaFold2 (which Salt runs 22x faster), ProteinMPNN, and Chroma without writing code, turning months of pipeline engineering into weeks while keeping every prompt, weight, and response logged for compliance.
Michelle Lee
Michelle Lee is the founder and CEO of Medra, a San Francisco company building 'Physical AI Scientists' - robot arms with cameras and sensors, governed by AI, that run wet-lab biology experiments around the clock. A Stanford AI Lab PhD who worked at NVIDIA, SpaceX, and McKinsey, she walked away from an assistant professor post at NYU after AlphaFold 2's 2021 release convinced her that biology's real bottleneck was not algorithms but data, and that data is a robotics problem. Medra runs in production with partners including Genentech and raised a $52M Series A in December 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $63M.
Nate Beyor
Nate Beyor is Chief Business Officer at Salt AI, the Los Angeles contextual-AI platform built for life sciences and healthcare. A bioengineer turned consultant turned operator, he holds a PhD in bioengineering from UC Berkeley, where he built microfluidic devices to detect pathogens. He spent his career at the seam between technology and biology - microfluidics, biologics manufacturing, stem cell therapy at Asterias Biotherapeutics, and digital health - before leading the Health Tech practice as a Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group. At Salt AI he runs corporate strategy, the solutions portfolio, and market expansion, helping translational scientists and drug developers move faster with AI they can actually trust in regulated settings.
Vera Kutsenko
Vera Kutsenko is the founder and CEO of Atrix AI, a New York company building a trusted AI platform for life sciences that helps medical affairs teams at pharma and med-device companies turn messy real-world data into decisions they can act on. A Cornell-trained engineer who shipped code at Facebook and Uber, she is a two-time Y Combinator founder. Her previous startup, Neverland, was a venture-backed marketplace for houseplants and home gardening that raised $4.7M before closing. She is also a certified personal trainer who once ran her own plant nursery.