spatial-transcriptomics
(6)Complete Genomics
Complete Genomics is a San Jose-based life-science technology company and the Americas arm of MGI. Founded in 2005 as a pioneer of affordable whole-human-genome sequencing, it develops and sells next-generation sequencing instruments, reagents, and analysis software built on its proprietary PCR-free DNBSEQ (DNA nanoball) technology. The company aims to drive down the cost of sequencing - from the landmark $5,000 genome to sub-$100 - and supplies researchers, clinical labs, and biotech companies with a full workflow spanning sample prep, library construction, sequencing, and data analysis.
Todd Dickinson
Todd Dickinson is the CEO and a board member of Stellaromics, a Boston biotech commercializing 3D spatial biology born from Karl Deisseroth's Stanford lab and Xiao Wang's work at MIT and the Broad Institute. A Tufts-trained analytical chemist who did his PhD under David Walt, he spent more than 20 years turning genomics inventions into products: over a decade at Illumina during its rise as the DNA-sequencing leader, commercial work on Bionano Genomics' Irys nanochannel arrays, and CEO stints at Dovetail Genomics and Arc Bio, which he merged into Cantata Bio in 2022. At Stellaromics he raised $80 million in Series B (led by Catalyst4 with Stanford University Ventures) to launch Pyxa, the first commercial platform that reads gene expression inside intact tissue up to 40x thicker than conventional methods.
Noetik
Noetik is an AI-native biotechnology company building foundation models of human cancer biology to discover precision immunotherapies. It pairs one of the world's largest proprietary spatial-omics datasets - hundreds of millions of spatially resolved tumor and immune cells - with a high-throughput in vivo CRISPR Perturb-Map platform to train multimodal virtual cell models like OCTO-VC. These models simulate gene expression, cell states, and tumor-immune interactions, letting researchers find drug targets and predict patient response computationally. Founded in 2022 by former Recursion leaders Ron Alfa and Jacob Rinaldi, Noetik has raised roughly $62M and licenses its models to pharma, including an anchor partnership with GSK.
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.
Yongwei Zhang
Yongwei Zhang is the CEO of Complete Genomics and MGI Americas, leading one of the most ambitious efforts to make whole-genome sequencing fast, accurate, and affordable at scale. With a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins and dual bachelor's degrees from Tsinghua University, Zhang brings a rare blend of optics precision, software fluency, and entrepreneurial grit to the genomics frontier. He architected the DNBSEQ sequencing platform series now used by over 2,600 researchers in 100 countries, and has positioned Complete Genomics as a formidable challenger to Illumina's market dominance - at a fraction of the cost.
Ron Alfa
Ron Alfa is Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, an AI-native biotech building foundation models trained on one of the world's largest collections of multimodal human tumor data. A physician-scientist with an MD-PhD from Stanford and an MA in the History of Medicine from UCL, Alfa spent six years at Recursion Pharmaceuticals rising to SVP Head of Research before co-founding Noetik in 2023. The company's OCTO-VC virtual cell models and TARIO-2 autoregressive transformer are designed to predict which cancer patients will respond to which therapies - attacking the 95% failure rate of cancer clinical trials from the data side rather than the pharmacology side. In January 2026, Noetik signed a landmark $50M licensing deal with GSK, one of the first large-scale transactions to monetize a biological foundation model as a scalable enterprise asset.