Sentieon builds ultra-fast, highly accurate software for analyzing DNA and RNA sequencing data. Its pipelines - DNAseq, DNAscope, TNseq, and TNscope - replace the open-source GATK workflow with matching or better accuracy while running many times faster on ordinary CPUs, no specialized hardware required. Founded in 2014 and based in the Bay Area, the company has won top honors in multiple precisionFDA and DREAM challenges, and its tools are used by pharma, clinical labs, sequencing platform makers, and genomics researchers worldwide to turn raw reads into trustworthy variant calls quickly and cheaply.
Unravel Biosciences is a clinical-stage therapeutics company spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute that starts with a patient's RNA rather than a drug target. Its BioNAV probabilistic network model of human health screens 40,000-plus compounds in silico - reporting roughly 200x the hit rate of conventional screens - to find existing molecules that can push a disease back toward health. The company validates predictions in engineered whole-organism models (including CRISPR-edited tadpoles) and then in patients, aiming to bring effective, lower-cost therapies to rare and overlooked diseases. Its lead asset, RVL-001 (a proprietary formulation of vorinostat), holds FDA Orphan Drug Designation for Rett syndrome and has entered clinical studies.
Maneesh Jain is the CEO and Co-founder of Mirvie, a South San Francisco-based biotech company pioneering RNA-based blood tests to predict pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and preterm birth months before symptoms occur. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in life sciences and more than $1.5B in combined exits across five prior startups - including Ion Torrent (acquired by Life Technologies) and Cirina (acquired by GRAIL) - Jain trained at the Stanford Genome Technology Center and holds a BS from Caltech and a Master's in Applied Physics from Stanford. Mirvie has raised over $90 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, GV, General Catalyst, and the Gates Foundation, and received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for its preeclampsia risk test in 2022.