pharma
(30)
UsefulBI and the art of making data useful
A pharmaceutical batch, a stalled dashboard, a clinical document: UsefulBI works where information gets stuck. Its business is making the next decision easier to reach.
Veeva Systems made the paperwork the product.
Medicines need evidence, approvals, and a paper trail. Veeva built a business around that work - then began replacing the platform that helped it get started.
Aily Labs wants the boardroom in your pocket
A former finance executive found that AI could compress months of planning into weeks. Now Aily Labs is selling large companies a more ambitious idea: connect their data, then help them decide what to do.
The Medical Meeting That Refuses to End
Impact Communication Partners has spent more than four decades translating complicated science for healthcare professionals. Its sharpest idea is also its simplest: the best answer may arrive after the meeting is over.
Twist Medical and the patient in the byline
A medical communications agency is helping patients enter the scientific conversation as contributors. Its publication credits show what that work looks like - and why listening is only the beginning.
The Doctor Who Built a Research Machine Because He Never Had Time to Do Research
Dr Matt Wilson spent 14-hour shifts in emergency medicine with no time to eat, let alone run a study. So he built a platform that makes the research happen without the clinician lifting a finger - and pharma is paying to plug in.
The AI that reads every medical paper so pharma's scientists don't have to
Medical teams at drug companies read maybe 10% of the evidence that matters. Sorcero built AI agents to read the other 90% - and about a third of the top 30 global pharma companies are now paying for it.
The Birmingham startup that made pharma pay for trust it never earned
Del Smith and Tiffany Whitlow built a 200,000-member community first and an AI second - and got seven of the ten biggest drug makers to buy the trust they earned.
Astraea
Astraea is a San Francisco startup building an AI-native operating system for clinical trial biometrics. Its agentic platform turns raw study data and a protocol into FDA-ready outputs - SDTM and ADaM datasets, TFLs, and submission packages - compressing work that normally takes months into days while keeping humans in the loop for review and regulatory sign-off. Founded in 2026 by Stanford's Joshua Wang and Sanmay Sarada, the company is part of Y Combinator's Spring 2026 (P26) batch.
b12 Labs
b12 Labs is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator S25) building AI agents for pharmaceutical and biotech chemistry. Its platform designs synthesis routes, plans and optimizes reactions, and turns those plans into robot-ready code for automated labs, aiming to compress early-stage drug discovery from years to months. The company was founded in 2025 by chemists Zlatko Joncev and Andres Bran, who met at EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence.
Frekil
Frekil is an AI-powered real-world evidence (RWE) platform for life sciences that turns raw clinical data - EHR, claims, and registries - into regulatory-grade evidence in minutes instead of months. Its agentic pipeline runs the full study lifecycle, from literature review and cohort building through statistical analysis plan generation and final reports, while keeping clinical data isolated from AI models. Founded in 2025 by IIT Bombay alumni Nikhil Tiwari and Shivesh Gupta, Frekil is a Y Combinator (X25/P25) company serving pharma, biotech, CROs, and academic researchers.
G LNK
G LNK is a New York-based healthcare commercial intelligence platform (Y Combinator W25) that helps pharma, biotech, and medtech teams find the right medical experts, benchmark fair-market compensation, and stay compliant. Its AI search sits on a searchable clinician database - 9.2M+ HCP profiles at last count - and automates the full lifecycle of engaging healthcare professionals, from identification and tiering to compliant payment and regulatory oversight across 150+ countries.
Code Ocean
Code Ocean is a New York-based B2B SaaS platform that makes computational research reproducible, traceable and collaborative. Its flagship Compute Capsule bundles code, data and the exact software environment together so an analysis runs identically today or years from now. Used by pharma, biotech and leading research institutes, and integrated with journals like Nature and IEEE, Code Ocean is building a trusted virtual lab where both scientists and AI agents can run real analyses with full version control, lineage and compliance.
DeepHow
DeepHow is a Detroit-based enterprise AI company that turns the hands-on know-how of experienced industrial workers into structured, searchable training. Founded in 2018 by former Siemens innovation leaders, its platform uses vision AI and machine learning to capture expert workflows on video, automatically segment and transcribe them into step-by-step guides, and - in its newer 'physical AI' products - verify that frontline operators are performing tasks correctly in real time. Used by manufacturers, pharma companies and field-service organizations to close skills gaps as veteran workers retire.
Forus
Forus is a New York-based healthtech company (formerly Tandem Technology, Inc.) that runs an AI-powered network connecting doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma to get prescribed medications to patients faster. Its software embeds in physician workflows and automates the administrative steps between a clinical decision and a patient starting treatment - prior authorization, benefit verification, financial assistance, and pharmacy routing. Free for doctors and patients, Forus earns revenue through pharmaceutical partnerships. Founded in 2023 by former Oscar Health product leader Sahir Jaggi, the company reached a reported $1 billion valuation in May 2026 with backing from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Accel.
Lyfegen
Lyfegen is a Swiss health-tech company that builds software to manage value-based drug pricing and rebate agreements. Its platform helps health insurers, governments, hospital payers, pharmaceutical firms and medical device makers automate complex rebate contracts, run pricing simulations and tap the world's largest library of value-based agreements - reducing administrative burden while helping patients access innovative therapies.
Cromatic
Cromatic is an AI-native platform for life-science R&D outsourcing and revenue operations. It runs a curated marketplace connecting biotech and pharma companies with vetted Contract Research Organizations (CROs) and Contract Development and Manufacturing Organizations (CDMOs), then layers on vendor discovery, project tracking, data storage, collaboration, contracting, and milestone payments so scientists can outsource complex research without stitching together spreadsheets, email threads, and word-of-mouth referrals. Founded in 2022 by Stanford geneticist Ann Lin and former Meta engineer Anne Chen, the company raised a $5.3M oversubscribed seed round in November 2023 and manages tens of millions of dollars in research budgets.
Delineate
Delineate is a Cambridge, Massachusetts AI company building agents that accelerate clinical trial design for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Its custom large language models and computer vision systems extract and structure data from thousands of research papers and patents - including numbers buried inside figures and plots - turning months of manual evidence aggregation into weeks. A Y Combinator Winter 2025 company founded in 2024 by an MIT PhD and an ex-Lockheed Skunkworks AI lead, Delineate works with two top-10 pharmaceutical companies and holds an NIH STTR grant with MIT.
Atinary Technologies
Atinary Technologies is a Swiss-American deeptech startup whose no-code SDLabs platform pairs machine learning with lab robotics to run Self-Driving Labs - closed-loop experiments that learn and adapt on the fly, accelerating R&D in chemistry, materials, pharma and climate tech by orders of magnitude.
Synthio Labs
Synthio Labs builds clinical-grade voice and agentic AI for life sciences customer engagement. Its platform helps pharma field teams, medical affairs, and patient-support orgs run compliant, continuous conversations across HCPs and patients, powered by a clinical reasoning engine that ingests FDA labels and real-world evidence.
PointCross Life Sciences
PointCross Life Sciences is a Foster City, California software and services company that turns the messy data of drug development into FDA-ready submissions. Through its XBIOM platform and eDataValidator, it standardizes nonclinical and clinical study data to CDISC SEND, SDTM and ADaM formats, runs a Hadoop-based data repository for sponsors, and supplies the U.S. FDA itself with the software reviewers use to read nonclinical submissions. The company quietly powers roughly a quarter of all FDA SEND submissions.
Unlearn.AI
Unlearn.AI is a San Francisco biotech-AI company that builds disease-specific machine learning models to generate digital twins of clinical trial participants - longitudinal predictions of how each patient would have fared on placebo. Folded into a statistical method called PROCOVA and a trial design called TwinRCT, the approach lets sponsors shrink control arms by up to a third, so more patients receive the experimental drug while trials reach answers faster. Founded in 2017 by physicists Charles Fisher, Aaron Smith and Jon Walsh, the company has raised about $130M and earned a first-of-its-kind EMA qualification for an AI-based method to reduce sample size in pivotal trials.
Biorce
Biorce is a Barcelona-based healthtech company building AI-native infrastructure for clinical trials. Its core product, Aika, helps pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and CROs design regulator-ready trial protocols in roughly 90 seconds, drawing on a corpus of more than one million clinical studies and 260,000+ protocols. By cutting protocol design time by at least 50% and flagging regulatory and feasibility risks early, Biorce aims to compress the years and billions of dollars it takes to bring a drug to market - so treatments reach patients sooner. In February 2026 it closed a USD $52.5M Series A led by DST Global, the largest Series A to date in the Iberian healthtech and AI ecosystem.
Treeline Biosciences
Treeline Biosciences is a Watertown, Massachusetts biotech founded in 2021 by Loxo Oncology founder Josh Bilenker and former Novartis oncology head Jeff Engelman. It pairs in-house wet-lab R&D with leading-edge computational tools to invent cancer medicines reliably and repeatedly, choosing targets by what the technology can reach rather than by therapeutic fashion. After operating largely in stealth, Treeline has raised more than $1.1 billion and moved three programs - a BCL6 degrader, a pan-KRAS inhibitor, and an EZH2 inhibitor - into Phase 1 trials. In June 2026 it agreed to go public through an all-stock reverse merger with Standard BioTools, with the combined company set to trade on Nasdaq as 'TRLN'.
Vivodyne
Vivodyne is a biotech company that grows more than 20 types of lifelike human organ tissues in the lab, then uses robotic automation to dose, cultivate, and analyze more than 10,000 of them at a time. The vast human datasets it generates feed multimodal AI models that predict how new drugs will behave in people - before they ever reach a clinical trial. The pitch is blunt: roughly 95% of therapies that work in animal models fail in human trials, and Vivodyne wants to fix that gap with real human data instead of mice.
Medisafe
Medisafe is a digital health company that turns the everyday struggle of taking pills on time into a behavior-driven engagement platform. Born from a near-fatal insulin overdose in the founders' own family, it began as a free virtual pillbox app and grew into an enterprise platform - anchored by Medisafe Maestro and its Just-in-Time Interventions (JITI) engine - that pharmaceutical companies use to keep patients on therapy. With more than 13 million users worldwide and 4+ billion doses tracked, Medisafe sits at the intersection of consumer mobile health and the multibillion-dollar problem of medication non-adherence.
Cellares
Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. Its Cell Shuttle - a fully automated, high-throughput platform roughly the size of a small conference room - replaces a warren of manual labs with one box that can run 16 patient batches in parallel, cutting labor and facility footprint by about 90 percent.
Medable
Medable is a Palo Alto-based digital health company building a cloud SaaS platform for decentralized and hybrid clinical trials. Its tools - eCOA+, Total Consent, Sensors, and Televisit - let pharma sponsors and CROs run studies remotely, enrolling patients in over 60 countries and 120+ languages.
Power
Power is a patient-first marketplace for clinical trials. The platform helps patients discover and enroll in promising research studies, while giving sites, sponsors, and CROs an AI-driven engine to accelerate recruitment across 30,000+ active U.S. trials and 10,000+ conditions.
Yoneda Labs
Yoneda Labs is building the foundation model for chemical manufacturing - think of it as the AI brain that tells chemists exactly which conditions to use to make a reaction work, before they spend months running dead-end experiments. Founded by three Cambridge graduates and backed by Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the company's software suite (Predict, Optimize, Analyze) compresses reaction optimization timelines from months to days. Their first named partnership with Symeres pushed cross-coupling reaction yields from ~30% to over 90%. The goal: become the universal AI layer for the $5 trillion chemical industry.