research-tools
(8)
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.
Stellaromics Inc.
Stellaromics is a Boston-based spatial biology company building tools that map gene expression in three dimensions inside intact tissue. Spun out of the labs of Karl Deisseroth (Stanford) and Xiao Wang (MIT/Broad Institute), the company commercializes its Pyxa platform, which uses proprietary STARmap and RIBOmap chemistry to deliver multiplexed 3D spatial transcriptomics and translatomics in tissue sections up to 100 microns thick at subcellular resolution. It targets researchers in neuroscience, oncology and immunology who need to preserve native tissue architecture rather than rely on flat 2D thin-section methods.
Latent Knowledge
Latent Knowledge is a New York-based AI company building LitView, a semantic search and literature-visualization tool that helps R&D teams and academic researchers discover, cluster, and map scientific literature beyond simple keyword matching. Founded in 2019 by James Reilly, the company uses applied natural language processing to surface hidden links between technical articles and speed up the research process across public and private data sources.
Portal Biotechnologies
Portal Biotechnologies is a Watertown, Massachusetts cell-engineering platform company building tools that push complex cargo - mRNA, siRNA, CRISPR complexes, proteins - into living cells by squeezing them through microscopic holes in a silicon surface, rather than relying on viruses or chemistry. Founded in 2023 by Armon Sharei, the MIT-trained scientist behind SQZ Biotechnologies, Portal sells hardware and consumables to drug discovery and cell therapy labs instead of developing its own drugs. Its instruments are used across more than 100 customer sites, including many of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and the company has raised seed and follow-on funding plus a DARPA contract for portable, point-of-care cell manufacturing.
Nextnet
Nextnet is a San Francisco-based life sciences AI platform that unifies the world's biomedical data into a semantic web, helping researchers find evidence-backed answers and connections across literature, genes, drugs, targets, and diseases. Its products - Nextnet Copilot and Nextnet Explorer - serve researchers at institutions including Harvard, MIT, UCSF, MD Anderson, and Columbia.
Quartzy
Quartzy is the lab management platform used by research scientists to track inventory, manage orders, and buy supplies from a marketplace of more than 1,000 suppliers - all in one place. Founded in 2011 by two Columbia PhD students who got tired of the paperwork eating their bench time.
Kim Kelderman
Kim Kelderman is the President and CEO of Bio-Techne Corporation, a global life science tools and diagnostics company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With over 30 years of healthcare and life sciences experience, Kelderman rose through the ranks at Bio-Techne after joining in 2018 to lead the Diagnostics and Genomics segment, where he doubled the spatial biology business and commercialized the ExoDx Prostate test. A native of the Netherlands educated at Hogeschool Heerlen and Columbia Business School, he previously held executive roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific and Becton Dickinson. He became CEO on February 1, 2024, succeeding Chuck Kummeth.
Steven Banerjee
Steven Banerjee is the Founder and CEO of Nextnet, a life sciences AI platform that organizes and connects the world's biomedical knowledge. A serial biotech entrepreneur originally from New Zealand, he trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Canterbury, served as a Doctoral Fellow at IBM Labs, and collaborated with gene sequencing pioneer Ron Davis at Stanford before founding his first venture, Mekonos - a cell and gene therapy company that raised over $40 million and was acquired. He then founded Nextnet in late 2020 to bring AI-native research tools to scientists, building a platform now used across 100+ countries by researchers at Harvard, MIT, MD Anderson, and UCSF. Nextnet's Copilot and Explorer tools are powered by a purpose-built biomedical ontology unifying data from PubMed, ChEMBL, Ensembl, and millions of scientific sources.