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.
Zafrens is a San Diego biotechnology company building an ultra-high-throughput single-cell platform that isolates, images, runs assays on, and sequences millions of individual cells per day. Its Z-Screen technology swaps the conventional 96-well plate for a credit-card-sized plastic chip holding 50,000 to 200,000 microwells, each with integrated imaging and multi-omic sequencing. By linking perturbation to genotype, phenotype and function at single-cell resolution, Zafrens compresses multiple stages of drug discovery into a single benchtop experiment - a 500x to 2,000x jump in the number of experiments a scientist can run at one timepoint.
Bloom Science is a San Diego clinical-stage biotech translating the biology of the ketogenic diet into oral live biotherapeutics that act through the gut-immune-brain axis. Built on microbiome research licensed from UCLA and powered by its IrisRx discovery platform, the company is developing BL-001, a once-daily bacterial therapy being studied in obesity and in drug-resistant seizures from Dravet syndrome, with a pipeline reaching toward ALS and neurodegenerative disease.
Mirador Therapeutics is a San Diego precision-medicine company building first- and best-in-class therapies for immune-mediated inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. Its Mirador360 engine fuses human genetics, multi-modal patient data, AI and advanced analytics to find novel targets, design combination therapies and identify the patients most likely to respond. Founded in 2024 by the former Prometheus Biosciences leadership team, Mirador launched with more than $400 million and has since raised over $650 million total.