proteomics
(10)
Synthetic Sciences
Synthetic Sciences is a Y Combinator (W26) startup building AI co-scientists that run the full research loop - literature review, hypothesis generation, experiment design, code execution on GPUs, analysis, and publication-ready drafts. Founded in 2025 by Aayam Bansal and Ishaan Gangwani, the company pairs a research product (synsci, plus the open-source OpenScience workbench and the Atlas compute layer) with a thesis that proprietary research-process data is the path to scientific foundation models with genuine research 'taste'. Its biology mode reached 92% on the BixBench Verified benchmark.
Spear Bio
Spear Bio is a Woburn, Massachusetts biotechnology company commercializing SPEAR (Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction), an ultra-sensitive, wash-free immunoassay platform licensed from Harvard's Wyss Institute. SPEAR measures protein biomarkers at attomolar levels from sub-microliter samples using a two-factor authentication mechanism and standard qPCR instruments, delivering more than a 5-log improvement over conventional ELISA. The company sells assay kits - initially for neurodegeneration biomarkers such as pTau217, pTau231, GFAP and neurofilament light - to academic, pharmaceutical and clinical researchers.
Calibra Scientific Inc.
Calibra Scientific Inc. (Hangzhou Calibra Diagnostics Co., Ltd., 凯莱谱) is a clinical mass spectrometry and multi-omics company that builds the full stack of precision diagnostics - instruments, reagent kits, reference materials and central-lab services. Founded in 2016 by Hua-fen Liu, a veteran of SCIEX, Roche and Pfizer, and backed as a DIAN Diagnostics company, Calibra has launched the NMPA-registered CalQuant-S mass spectrometry system, 10+ Class II reagent kits and 300+ clinical assays, serving more than 20,000 hospitals and research institutions across China.
Fauna Bio
Fauna Bio is an AI-driven drug discovery company that mines roughly 100 million years of evolved disease resistance in mammals to find new human therapies. Founded in 2018 in the San Francisco Bay Area, it combines comparative genomics, a proprietary animal biobank, and machine learning - through its Convergence and Fauna Brain platforms - to translate the biology of hibernators and other resilient species into drug targets for conditions like obesity, heart failure, neurodegeneration, and retinal disease. Its work has attracted a partnership with Eli Lilly worth up to $494 million.
Talus Bio
Talus Bio is a Seattle drug-discovery company going after transcription factors and other regulatory proteins long written off as 'undruggable.' Its MARMOT platform measures the human regulome directly in living cells using functional proteomics and high-throughput mass spectrometry, then feeds tens of millions of compound-target interactions into a lab-in-the-loop AI system to design small molecules that switch disease-driving genes on or off. Founded in 2020 by Alex Federation and Lindsay Pino, the company runs preclinical programs in chordoma, non-small cell lung cancer, and prostate cancer.
InterVenn Biosciences
InterVenn Biosciences is a South San Francisco biotech building an AI-driven glycoproteomics platform that reads the sugar coatings on proteins to detect disease earlier. Its flagship blood test, GlycoKnow Ovarian, distinguishes ovarian cancer from benign pelvic masses with ~86% accuracy and went commercial in 2025. Founded in 2017 by Aldo Carrascoso with chemists Carolyn Bertozzi (Nobel Laureate) and Carlito Lebrilla, the company has raised roughly $244M, including a $201M Series C led by SoftBank in 2021.
Newomics, Inc.
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.
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, Inc.
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
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.