microfluidics
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Sanjeev Saxena
Sanjeev Saxena is a serial medical-device entrepreneur and engineer who has spent more than 30 years trying to move cancer screening out of expensive central labs and into villages, clinics and pop-up sites. He is founder, CEO and CTO of Harae Dx Corp., a Pleasanton, California startup building a low-cost, portable, automated cancer detection system based on lab-on-a-disc microfluidics. Earlier he founded POC Medical Systems, whose MammoAlert and Pandora CDx platforms brought portable breast-cancer screening to emerging markets, and he co-founded Scanis, Actis Biologics and Telesto Diagnostics. He has raised more than $70 million across his ventures and sits on the board of the Texas Tech Research Park.
Li Sun
Li Sun is the founder and CEO of Shennon Biotechnologies, a San Francisco single-cell immunotherapy company that profiles millions of immune cells in hours to pinpoint the rare T cells and antibody targets that fight cancer. A physicist by training (PhD from Harvard's Weitz lab, M.Eng from MIT), she spent five years as a deep-tech venture investor at Bessemer and Foundation Capital before building the platform herself. Shennon emerged from stealth in March 2023 with a $13M seed round led by DCVC.
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.
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.
Alla Zamarayeva
Alla Zamarayeva is the co-founder and CEO of CellFE, a Bay Area biotech building a non-viral, microfluidics-based platform for engineering human cells. A UC Berkeley engineering PhD and former Goldwater Scholar, she spun a piece of academic research she stumbled onto during her doctorate into a company aiming to make cell therapies cheaper, gentler, and eventually available at the point of care. In 2023 she led CellFE to a $22 million Series A backed by M Ventures, and she is steering the company toward redefining how gene-edited cell therapies are manufactured.
Daojing Wang
Daojing Wang is the founder, president, and CEO of Newomics, a Berkeley biotech building chip-based mass spectrometry tools for precision medicine. A Princeton-trained chemist who spent 11 years as a principal investigator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he co-invented the M3 emitter and multinozzle emitter array (MEA) - a silicon shower-head that makes mass spectrometers far more sensitive. He spun the technology out of the national lab in 2013 and has since shipped well over 100 systems to labs worldwide.
Gajus Worthington
Gajus Worthington is a life sciences entrepreneur, engineer, and inventor who turned an idea for circuits that move fluid instead of electrons into Fluidigm, a microfluidics company he co-founded in 1999 and led as CEO through its IPO and years as a public company. Today he is Chairman and CEO of Superfluid Dx, a South San Francisco company building a blood test that reads cell-free messenger RNA from the brain to diagnose Alzheimer's disease earlier and more precisely. Between those chapters he served as COO of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, co-founded Kaizen Therapeutics and the ML/AI healthcare company StatOS, and became a Managing Partner at WRQ Sciences.
Yuyo Llamazares Vegh
Yuyo Llamazares Vegh is the CEO and Co-Founder of Stämm, a San Francisco-based biotech company reinventing biomanufacturing through miniaturized 3D-printed microfluidic bioreactors. A native of Argentina with a background in agricultural engineering and bioprocesses from the University of Buenos Aires, Yuyo co-founded Stämm in 2016 alongside his cousin Federico D'Alvia Vegh after spotting a fundamental gap between biology's potential and the outdated tools available to harness it. Stämm's platform - desktop-sized, modular, and scalable - is designed to make the production of biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies accessible and repeatable at any scale. The company has raised over $17 million including a Series A led by Varana Capital with participation from Draper Associates and SOSV's IndieBio, and has attracted former Merck KGaA CEO Stefan Oschmann to its board. Yuyo was selected as an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2023.