Samantha Scott, PhD is the founder and CEO of JuneBrain, a Baltimore medtech startup building the first wearable, technician-free retinal scanning system. Trained as a biomedical engineer at Stanford and USC, she is turning high-resolution eye imaging plus AI into a way to detect and monitor brain and eye conditions far outside the walls of a clinic. JuneBrain has raised more than $3 million in private capital, won $3 million in NSF grants, holds four issued patents, and is on track for an FDA submission.
Jason Ehrlich is the co-founder and CEO of Ollin Biosciences, an Austin-based clinical-stage biopharma launched in September 2025 with $100 million to build best-in-disease eye medicines. An MD-PhD ophthalmologist trained at Princeton and Stanford, he spent a decade at Genentech/Roche helping shepherd retina drugs including Lucentis and the bispecific faricimab (Vabysmo), then served five years as chief medical and development officer at Kodiak Sciences. At Ollin he is taking direct aim at the market leader: in early 2026 his lead asset OLN324 beat faricimab head-to-head in a randomized Phase 1b study, drying retinas faster and deeper with a clean safety record.
Adaptilens is a pre-clinical biotechnology company in Newton, Massachusetts developing the first biomimetic accommodating intraocular lens (A-IOL) - a soft, flexible artificial lens that responds to the eye's natural focusing signal from the ciliary muscle. Founded by ophthalmologist Dr. Liane Clamen, the company aims to replace the cataract-clouded natural lens with one that restores clear vision across near, intermediate, and distance ranges without glasses, contacts, or the halos and glare common to multifocal alternatives. Adaptilens raised a $17.5M Series A in April 2024 to advance its A-IOL toward first-in-human trials.
Avisi Technologies is a clinical-stage ophthalmic medical device company building VisiPlate, an ultrathin, nanotechnology-enabled aqueous shunt that drains excess fluid from the eye to lower pressure in glaucoma patients. Spun out of the University of Pennsylvania's Y-Prize program in 2017, the company is advancing VisiPlate through the FDA-cleared SAPPHIRE pivotal trial and has raised roughly $21.7M to date, including a $10.7M Series A in February 2026.
Intalight is a US-based ophthalmic imaging company (the international brand of SVision Imaging / 视微影像, Luoyang, China) that builds high-speed swept-source OCT and OCT-angiography systems. Its flagship DREAM OCT platform images the whole eye in a single ultra-widefield scan, combining deep retinal penetration, anterior-segment imaging, biometry, and AI-driven segmentation for clinicians and researchers worldwide.
Kriya Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company building one-time, AAV-based gene therapies for prevalent chronic diseases of high unmet need. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina with operations in Silicon Valley, Kriya pairs a proprietary, vertically integrated manufacturing and R&D engine with a pipeline spanning ophthalmology, metabolic disease, and neurology. Its bet: gene therapy shouldn't be reserved for the rare few, but engineered and manufactured at the scale and cost needed to reach millions.
Bing Li is the CEO and co-founder of Intalight, an ophthalmic imaging company behind the DREAM OCT swept-source platform. Founded in 2014 by a group of scientists and Silicon Valley industry veterans, Intalight built one of the first swept-source OCT devices in 2019 and has since powered more than 170 peer-reviewed retinal-imaging studies. Trained as an engineer and applied mathematician, Li moved from the auto and semiconductor industries into eye care, betting that faster, deeper, wider retinal scans would change how clinicians see inside the eye. In May 2025 the company won CE Mark clearance to sell DREAM OCT across the European Union, with FDA review pending in the United States.
Noveome Biotherapeutics is a Pittsburgh clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company built around ST266, a multi-targeted secretome of hundreds of biologically active proteins harvested from a novel population of amnion-derived cells. Rather than transplanting cells, Noveome delivers the healing signals those cells secrete - aiming to modulate inflammation, protect nerves, and accelerate tissue repair. Its lead program treats necrotizing enterocolitis, a devastating gut disease in premature infants, with additional pipeline work spanning ophthalmology, neurology, and dermatology.
Ollin Biosciences is an Austin-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company building a portfolio of best-in-disease therapies for vision-threatening eye diseases. Founded in 2023 and launched publicly in September 2025 with $100M in Series A financing, Ollin in-licenses validated drug candidates and races them through head-to-head trials against the market leaders. Its lead program, OLN324, is a VEGF/Ang2 bispecific antibody for wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema that posted superior anatomic results versus Roche's blockbuster Vabysmo in a Phase 1b study.
Liane Clamen is a Harvard-trained ophthalmologist and the founder and CEO of Adaptilens, a Newton, Massachusetts biotech building a biomimetic accommodating intraocular lens that imitates the young human lens so cataract patients can see near, intermediate, and distance without glasses. She sketched the idea more than two decades ago, fought the patent office to a 2019 grant, and in April 2024 closed a $17.5 million Series A to push the device toward its first human trial.
ViaLase, Inc. is a clinical-stage medical technology company in Aliso Viejo, California building the first femtosecond laser designed to treat primary open-angle glaucoma without cutting into the eye. Its ViaLuxe Laser System pairs micron-level, high-definition imaging with a femtosecond laser to perform a noninvasive, image-guided trabeculotomy - branded FLigHT - that creates a drainage channel through the trabecular meshwork to lower intraocular pressure. Founded in 2019 by femtosecond-laser pioneer Tibor Juhasz, the company has raised more than $115 million, earned a CE Mark in Europe, and begun a U.S. IDE clinical trial.
Luminopia is a commercial-stage digital therapeutics company that turns a child's favorite TV shows into FDA-cleared medicine for amblyopia (lazy eye). Children wear a VR headset for one hour a day, six days a week, and watch curated, real-time-modified episodes that retrain the brain to use both eyes together. Founded by Harvard dropouts and incubated at Boston Children's Hospital, Luminopia One became the first FDA-approved digital therapeutic for a neuro-visual disorder.
Rui Jing Jiang is the Founder and CEO of Avisi Technologies, a Redwood City-based clinical-stage medical device company developing VisiPlate, the world's thinnest freestanding ophthalmic implant for treating glaucoma. Built on University of Pennsylvania nanotechnology, VisiPlate is a multichannel aqueous shunt composed of alumina and Parylene-C that is 20 times thinner than a human hair. Rui Jing co-founded the company in 2017 as a junior at Penn's Wharton School, won the $100,000 President's Innovation Prize in 2018, secured FDA Investigational Device Exemption approval in October 2025 for the US SAPPHIRE trial, and closed a $10.7M Series A in February 2026 to advance pivotal clinical development.
Shawn O'Neil is the CEO of ViaLase, a clinical-stage medtech company building FLIGHT, an incision-free femtosecond laser procedure for glaucoma. He spent more than two decades at Alcon rising to head of sales and marketing for surgical glaucoma, then ran commercial at Sight Sciences before joining ViaLase as Chief Commercial Officer and stepping up to CEO in July 2025. His career has been a running tour of the products that reshaped eye surgery: EX-PRESS, LenSx, CyPass, OMNI, TearCare, and now a laser that treats glaucoma without ever touching the eye with a blade.
Scott Xiao is the co-founder and CEO of Luminopia, a Boston-area digital therapeutics company whose lead product turns watching cartoons in a VR headset into an FDA-approved treatment for amblyopia, the leading cause of vision loss in children. He left Harvard with classmate Dean Travers to build the first VR-based therapeutic ever cleared by the FDA, partnering with Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and DreamWorks for content and with Boston Children's Hospital and MIT for the science.
Andrew Huberman is a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine and the host of the Huberman Lab podcast - regularly ranked the #1 health and science podcast in the world with over 400 episodes. His Stanford lab investigates visual system repair, neural plasticity, and stress resilience, publishing in Nature, Science, and Cell. A former skateboarder who once wrote for Thrasher magazine and lobbied the Palo Alto city council to build a skate park at age 13, Huberman translates complex neuroscience into actionable protocols for millions of listeners globally.
NGM Biopharmaceuticals is a private South San Francisco biotech translating biology into first-in-class medicines, anchored by its GDF15/GFRAL antagonist NGM120 in Phase 2 trials for cancer cachexia and hyperemesis gravidarum.
Jacob Borrajo is the Founder and CEO of Amber Bio, a Cambridge-based biotech company pioneering a first-of-its-kind RNA writing platform capable of multi-kilobase edits. With a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT and research training at the Broad Institute, Borrajo has spent his career building at the intersection of CRISPR, machine learning, and synthetic biology. Amber Bio launched in August 2023 with a $26 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Playground Global, with strategic participation from Eli Lilly and the Retinal Degeneration Fund. His platform's key innovation: treating diseases with high allelic diversity using a single therapeutic product, by editing RNA rather than DNA - making gene therapy safer, reversible, and dramatically more scalable.
Robert Chang is the President and CEO of Myra Vision, a Campbell, California medtech company developing the Calibreye Titratable Glaucoma Therapy (TGT) Surgical System - an adjustable aqueous shunt designed to give glaucoma surgeons real-time, non-invasive control over intraocular pressure. With over 30 years of medical device executive experience spanning co-founding Ample Medical, leading MVRx, and serving as CTO at Sadra Medical (acquired by Boston Scientific), Chang brings a rare combination of hands-on engineering depth and serial CEO-level leadership to one of ophthalmology's most intractable surgical challenges. Myra Vision has raised $50M+ across seed, Series A, and a $25M Series B in 2023, and in early 2026 enrolled its first patient in the FDA-approved ADAPT pivotal study.
Diana Peng Bockus is the Chief Executive Officer of NGM Biopharmaceuticals, a South San Francisco biotech developing first-in-class medicines for liver disease, oncology, and ophthalmology. Appointed CEO in April 2025, she joined the company in 2020 to lead business development and restructured a pivotal Merck partnership that freed NGM to build a wholly owned pipeline. A Stanford and Wharton graduate with roots in management consulting at Bain & Company, she now steers a privately held biotech backed by $515M in total funding, focused on rare diseases like primary sclerosing cholangitis and hyperemesis gravidarum.