natural-products
(5)
Frontier Co-op
A two-person spice operation that began in an Iowa river cabin now links tens of thousands of member-owners to growers around the world. Its real product is not only what sits in the jar - it is a supply chain designed to keep quality, livelihoods and accountability in the same conversation.
Enveda
Enveda is a clinical-stage biotech that uses artificial intelligence to read the chemistry of the natural world and turn it into new medicines. Founded in 2019 by Viswa Colluru, the company built PRISM, a foundation model trained on more than a billion mass spectra, to decode the structure of natural molecules that traditional methods leave invisible. That platform has produced a pipeline of small-molecule drug candidates - led by ENV-294, an oral anti-inflammatory now in Phase 2 trials for atopic dermatitis and asthma. Backed by more than $700M in funding and valued as a unicorn, Enveda operates out of Boulder, Colorado and Hyderabad, India.
Hexagon Bio
Hexagon Bio is a Menlo Park biotech that mines the genomes of fungi and other microbes to discover new medicines. Its platform pairs machine learning, genomics, and synthetic biology to read DNA sequences, predict the small molecules they encode, and connect those molecules to the human proteins they act on - skipping the random trial-and-error that has long defined natural-product drug discovery. The company is focused on novel cytotoxic payloads for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) in oncology, and in late 2025 extended its approach to agriculture through a joint venture with Corteva.
Sensorium Therapeutics
Sensorium Therapeutics is a Boston-based biotechnology company building first-in-class central nervous system (CNS) medicines by decoding nature's neuroactive chemistry with AI. Founded out of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard, its proprietary SensAI platform mines more than 50 million curated relationships across ethnopharmacology, chemistry, pharmacology, and clinical outcomes to identify de-risked starting points for new drugs. Its lead program, SNTX-2643, is a rapid-acting precision serotonin modulator for anxiety that received FDA IND clearance in 2025.
Maureen Hillenmeyer
Maureen Hillenmeyer is the founder and CEO of Hexagon Bio, a Menlo Park drug-discovery company that mines the genomes of fungi for hidden small molecules and engineers yeast to brew them into potential medicines. A former competitive swimmer turned computational biologist, she holds a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford and built the company out of a Stanford research program she led, raising more than $270 million to turn DNA sequence data into cancer and infectious-disease therapeutics.