pharma
(16)
Zlatko Jončev
Zlatko Jončev is the co-founder and CEO of b-12 (b12 Labs), a Y Combinator S25 startup building AI agents that plan and run chemical synthesis for pharma and biotech. A former national chemistry olympiad champion turned organic chemist, he earned a PhD in Basel, trained as a medicinal chemist at Roche, and did his postdoc in EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence, where he met co-founder Andres Bran. b-12 aims to shrink early-stage drug discovery from years to months by making molecules that are otherwise hard to make.
Girisha Fernando
Girisha Fernando is the CEO and co-founder of Lyfegen, a Basel- and Boston-based healthtech company building software that helps payers, hospitals, pharma companies and medical device makers manage value-based drug pricing, access and rebate agreements. After nearly a decade at Roche in market access, pricing and IT, he left in 2018 to build technology that ties the price of medicine to how well it actually works for patients. He splits his time between Switzerland and New York as Lyfegen pushes into the US market.
Paul Eccles
Paul Eccles is a molecular biologist turned healthcare strategy consultant who leads Basis Health, the New York-based life sciences division of London-headquartered insight consultancy Basis Global. He joined Basis in September 2022 as Managing Partner after a career spanning Trinity Life Sciences, BluePrint Research Group, Cello Health, and Opinion Health, and has spent more than fifteen years advising pharma, biotech, and clinical incubators on commercialization, licensing, forecasting, and portfolio positioning.
Sean X. Hu
Sean X. Hu is the President and CEO of Rapafusyn Pharmaceuticals, a Baltimore-based biotech spun out of Johns Hopkins that is building a library of natural-product-like macrocycles it calls RapaGlues. He is a genomics PhD turned Wharton MBA turned management consultant turned operator, with prior stops at Bristol Myers Squibb, CuraGen, Illumina, AT Kearney, IMS, Bionest, BioStrat, GlobalData, and Avotres. In September 2025 he closed an oversubscribed $44M Series A led by BioTrack Capital and Yonjin Capital to push RapaGlues into difficult-to-drug targets.
Dan Cornwell
Dan Cornwell is the founder and CEO of PrescriberPoint, a Boston-based, AI-enabled medication access platform that helps clinicians cut through the paperwork between writing a prescription and a patient actually getting their medicine. Spun out of Eli Lilly in partnership with BCG Digital Ventures, the company raised seed backing from an unusual coalition of would-be rivals - Lilly, Pfizer, Adobe and Mastercard. Before PrescriberPoint, Cornwell ran the nurse-staffing marketplace IntelyCare and advised companies on building disruptive businesses at BCG Digital Ventures. A Yale historian turned Wharton-trained operator, he keeps returning to the same problem: the messy gap between a good intention and a completed transaction.
Dennis X. Hu
Dennis X. Hu is the founder and CEO of Drug Hunter, a subscription knowledge platform that distills the science behind new medicines for more than 200 R&D institutions, including most of the world's top pharma and biotech companies. A medicinal chemist by training, he led small-molecule teams at Genentech and the biotech RAPT Therapeutics (where he helped invent the Phase II oncology candidate tivumecirnon) before turning a side project into a fully remote company of 20+ employees that reaches millions of searches a year and runs entirely on subscription revenue.
David Steinberg
David Steinberg is Chief Business Officer at Formation Bio, an AI-native pharmaceutical company in New York, where he runs in- and out-licensing and pipeline strategy. A serial biotech company builder, he co-founded PureTech Health and served as its Chief Innovation Officer, was a General Partner at Longwood Fund, and founded or led a string of NASDAQ-listed and venture-backed companies including Pyxis Oncology, Vor Biopharma, Vedanta Biosciences and Be Biopharma. He pairs a Cornell biology degree with a University of Chicago Booth MBA and a career that began in R&D and strategy consulting.
Vincent Ling
Vincent Ling is the Chief Business Officer of Morphocell Technologies, a Laval-based regenerative medicine company building iPSC-derived engineered tissues to treat severe organ dysfunction, starting with liver disease. A biotech and pharma veteran of three decades, he spent 12 years at Takeda's Center for External Innovation, where he identified and backed the Kariko-Weissman mRNA platform out of the University of Pennsylvania - the science that became the first COVID mRNA vaccines and earned the 2023 Nobel Prize. He has held leadership roles at Genetics Institute, Adnexus Therapeutics, and Neurotech Pharmaceuticals, and advises the Gates Foundation and academic institutions.
Anthony Costello
Anthony Costello is the CEO of Medidata Solutions, a Dassault Systèmes company, and one of clinical research technology's most seasoned architects. With nearly 30 years in the field, he started as a data manager at Genentech, co-founded two companies (Nextrials and Mytrus), and was acquired by Medidata before rising to lead it. Today he oversees over 8,000 active clinical studies globally each year, championing AI-driven trial innovation, decentralized models, and patient-centric design at the White House Clinical Trials Forum and beyond.
Abhishek Jha
Abhishek Jha is the Co-Founder and CEO of Elucidata, a San Francisco-based AI company making biomedical data AI-ready for drug discovery and pharmaceutical R&D. A trained physical chemist with a PhD from the University of Chicago and postdoctoral work at MIT, he spent years at Agios Pharmaceuticals contributing to four FDA-approved first-in-class therapies before co-founding Elucidata in 2015. Under his leadership, the company has raised over $22.7M in funding, grown to 170 employees, and achieved $22.2M ARR, while evolving from a data-curation platform into an AI company solving out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in biomedical research - work that earned Elucidata recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2024.
Shahed Jaber
Shahed Jaber is the Co-Founder of Aumet Inc, MENA's largest B2B healthcare procurement marketplace. Based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he previously founded UniOrders - a B2B healthcare marketplace acquired by Aumet in 2020. With a pharmacy background from the University of Jordan, Jaber has helped grow Aumet into an AI-first procurement platform serving 12,000+ pharmacies and 32 hospitals across the MENA region, processing over $1 billion in GMV and raising $21.84M in total funding.
Dan Riskin
Dan Riskin is a physician-entrepreneur, trauma surgeon, and healthcare AI executive who founded Verantos in 2015 to generate high-validity real-world evidence from messy clinical data. A serial innovator who began coding at age 5 and sold software at 12, Riskin holds an MD from Boston University and an MBA from MIT, is board-certified in four specialties, and serves as Clinical Professor of Surgery at Stanford. His prior company Health Fidelity was acquired for more than $150 million. Today, Verantos powers regulatory and reimbursement decisions for major pharmaceutical companies by turning fragmented EHR data into research-grade evidence at scale.
Siva Samy
Dr. Siva Samy is the founder, CEO, and Chief Product Strategist of ValGenesis, the global leader in digital validation lifecycle management for the life sciences industry. He built the first platform to fully digitize and automate the pharmaceutical validation process - the compliance-critical system that ensures every drug, device, and biotech product is manufactured correctly. Under his leadership, ValGenesis has become trusted by 30 of the top 50 global life sciences companies and has raised over $40 million in funding, including a $24M investment from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and a $16M debt financing in 2025.
Steve Herne
Steve Herne is the CEO of Unlearn.AI, a San Francisco-based company building AI-powered digital twin technology to transform how clinical trials are designed and run. With over 25 years of experience across pharmaceutical R&D companies including WCG, Bioclinica, and Covance, Herne joined Unlearn in May 2024 as Chief Commercial Officer before ascending to CEO in September 2024. Under his leadership, Unlearn — backed by $130M+ in venture funding including a $50M Series C led by Altimeter Capital — is pivoting from research-led to commercially-driven product delivery, with its digital twin models now EMA-qualified and adopted by major biopharma companies to reduce placebo arm sizes by up to 38% in pivotal trials.
Supreet Deshpande
Supreet Deshpande is Co-Founder and CEO of Synthio Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup building clinical-grade voice AI for the life sciences industry. Drawing on his experience leading Gen AI for Life Sciences at McKinsey and analytics work at ZS Associates and JPMorgan Chase, Deshpande is solving a stubborn pharma problem: 70% of physicians never hear from a field team despite billions spent. Synthio's AI voice agents - reaching every clinician and patient with compliant, multilingual, FDA-aligned conversations - raised a $5M seed round led by Elevation Capital in November 2025 and already counts several Top 10 pharma companies as customers.
Hermann Tribukait
Hermann Tribukait is the co-founder and CEO of Atinary Technologies, a Lausanne- and Silicon Valley-based deeptech startup that built SDLabs — a no-code AI/ML platform compressing years of R&D into days. A Harvard-trained economist who helped coin the term 'Self-Driving Labs®' in 2017, Tribukait has channeled a career spent brokering $200M+ in global R&D partnerships into software that lets machines design experiments, learn from results, and iterate without human bias getting in the way. Atinary's tools are now used in pharma, biotech, chemicals, and climate tech, with a physical self-driving lab open in Boston since early 2026.