Zafrens is a San Diego biotechnology company building an ultra-high-throughput single-cell platform that isolates, images, runs assays on, and sequences millions of individual cells per day. Its Z-Screen technology swaps the conventional 96-well plate for a credit-card-sized plastic chip holding 50,000 to 200,000 microwells, each with integrated imaging and multi-omic sequencing. By linking perturbation to genotype, phenotype and function at single-cell resolution, Zafrens compresses multiple stages of drug discovery into a single benchtop experiment - a 500x to 2,000x jump in the number of experiments a scientist can run at one timepoint.
Swamy Vijayan is the CEO and cofounder of Zafrens, a San Diego biotech reinventing drug discovery by shrinking a 96-well plate down to 200,000 microwells that image and sequence single cells at once. A physicist by training who admits he was driven less by a love of biology than by dissatisfaction with theoretical physics, he is a serial founder whose previous company Omniome sold to Pacific Biosciences for up to $800 million. His stated goal is not a quick exit but a foundation for smart people to do important things for the next 100 years.
Rob Devlin is the co-founder and CEO of Metalenz, the first company to take metasurface optics out of the lab and into mass-market consumer devices. A Harvard-trained applied physicist who studied under Federico Capasso, he turned a Science cover paper into a fabless optical-semiconductor company that prints flat lenses in standard chip foundries. Under his leadership Metalenz shipped the world's first metasurfaces in consumer products with STMicroelectronics in 2022 and launched Polar ID, a polarization-based face authentication system. He keeps the first wafer of 10,000 metasurface lenses on his desk as a reminder of how a single fabrication shot eclipsed an entire PhD's worth of handmade devices.
Patrick Naulleau is the CEO of EUV Tech Inc., a Martinez, California-based company leading the development of at-wavelength extreme ultraviolet (EUV) metrology tools for semiconductor manufacturing. With over 25 years of pioneering work in EUV lithography — including helping build the world's first EUV scanner at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-developing the SHARP EUV mask microscope — Naulleau transitioned from world-class researcher to industry CEO in 2022. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, is a Fellow of both Optica and SPIE, and has authored over 400 publications. EUV Tech raised a $36M Series A led by Intel Capital in 2023.
Samuel Rodriques is a physicist-turned-bioengineer and co-founder and CEO of Edison Scientific, the AI-driven scientific discovery company behind Kosmos - an AI scientist that reportedly condenses six months of PhD-level research into a single day. A MIT PhD and Hertz Fellow who invented implosion fabrication and pioneered spatial transcriptomics, Rodriques left the Francis Crick Institute to co-found FutureHouse (funded by Eric Schmidt) in 2023, then spun it into for-profit Edison Scientific, which raised a $70M seed round at a $250M valuation in December 2025. Named to Time 100 AI in 2025, he is on a mission to cure all diseases by mid-century through AI-accelerated science.