Alex Federation is the co-founder and CEO of Talus Bio, a Seattle biotech building drugs for transcription factors, the gene-control proteins long written off as 'undruggable.' A Harvard-trained chemical biologist who studied under Jay Bradner, he invented the MARMOT platform to measure and modulate the regulome inside living cells, pairing functional proteomics with AI models trained on tens of millions of compound-target interactions. He teamed with proteomics scientist Lindsay Pino in 2020, went through Y Combinator, and has raised roughly $24.7M to chase first-in-class medicines for targets like Brachyury, AR-V7, and STAT3.
Ashley Zehnder is the co-founder and CEO of Fauna Bio, a Berkeley biotech mining the genomes of hibernating ground squirrels, bears and 452 other mammal species for drugs that could treat humans. A boarded avian veterinarian with a Stanford PhD in cancer biology, she had her career epiphany while giving chemotherapy to a parrot, when a faculty member asked in disbelief, 'Birds... get cancer?' That question convinced her the wall between animal and human medicine was an illusion. Fauna Bio's Convergence AI platform turns the survival tricks of extreme mammals into therapeutic targets, work that has drawn partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk and NASA-funded research into putting astronauts into a hibernation-like state.
Daojing Wang is the founder, president, and CEO of Newomics, a Berkeley biotech building chip-based mass spectrometry tools for precision medicine. A Princeton-trained chemist who spent 11 years as a principal investigator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he co-invented the M3 emitter and multinozzle emitter array (MEA) - a silicon shower-head that makes mass spectrometers far more sensitive. He spun the technology out of the national lab in 2013 and has since shipped well over 100 systems to labs worldwide.
Newomics is a Berkeley, California biotechnology company building mass spectrometry front-end hardware for precision medicine. Spun out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, its silicon multinozzle emitter (M3) and MnESI ion source upgrade existing mass spectrometers to deliver microflow robustness with nanospray sensitivity, enabling higher-throughput, higher-sensitivity multiomics across proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, native MS and single-cell analysis. The company sells to pharmaceutical, academic and government labs and co-markets with major instrument vendors like Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Pleno Inc. is a San Diego multi-omic instrument company rebuilding the economics of biological target detection. Its RAPTOR platform, powered by proprietary Hypercoding technology borrowed from telecommunications signal processing, can detect up to 10,000 targets in a single sample at PCR-like speed and cost. Founded by serial entrepreneur Pieter van Rooyen, the company is moving from R&D into commercial launch with backing from Deerfield Management and Foresite Capital.
Progentec Diagnostics is an Oklahoma City company building blood-based biomarker tests and digital health tools for autoimmune diseases, starting with lupus. Its lead product, the aiSLE DX Flare Risk Index, uses an 11-biomarker algorithm to predict a lupus flare up to 12 weeks before it happens, giving rheumatologists a chance to intervene early. Spun out of research tied to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, the company pairs lab science with patient-facing tools like the LupusCorner community to move autoimmune care from reactive to proactive.
Watershed Bio (legally Watershed Informatics) is a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building a unified, cloud-based platform for biological data analysis. Its product, Omics Bench, lets biologists and bioinformaticians securely store, harmonize, and analyze multi-omic data - genomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbial sequencing and protein folding - using customizable and AI-assisted workflows backed by elastic supercomputing. The pitch: go from sample to therapeutic insight in a single day instead of weeks, closing the gap between high-code and no-code bioinformatics for drug-discovery teams.
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.
Chris Varma, Ph.D., is Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Frontier Medicines, a clinical-stage biotech attacking cancer's 'undruggable' proteins using chemoproteomics, covalent chemistry, and machine learning. A serial biotech founder with 20+ years in life sciences, he previously co-founded Blueprint Medicines (acquired by Sanofi for $9B+ in 2025) and Warp Drive Bio (acquired by Revolution Medicines in 2018), and held investor roles at Third Rock Ventures, Flagship Pioneering, and MPM Capital. His career spans the FDA, Novartis, and three successful company builds - with Frontier Medicines now advancing FMC-376, a first-in-class dual KRAS G12C inhibitor, through Phase 1/2 clinical trials.