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Joshua Grass Is Building a Second Life for Shelved Science
After two biotech exits and 15 years inside BioMarin, Joshua Grass is betting that some promising medicines stall for organizational reasons, not scientific ones. His new company, Mendra, raised $82 million to find those overlooked programs and carry them farther.
Mendra
Mendra is an AI-native biopharmaceutical company based in San Francisco that acquires, develops, and commercializes therapies for rare and ultra-rare diseases with high unmet need. Founded in 2025 and launched publicly in January 2026 with an $82 million Series A, the company is run by veterans of BioMarin, Palantir, and other rare disease programs. Rather than discovering compounds from scratch, Mendra systematically scans, scores, and acquires shelved or under-resourced rare disease assets from academia, small biotechs, and big pharma, then uses AI to accelerate patient identification, clinical trial enrollment, and global market access.