watertown-massachusetts
(3)
Will Cao
Will (Yangxiaolu) Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Pando Bioscience (YC W23), a Watertown, Massachusetts company using generative AI and ultra-high-throughput screening to engineer better enzymes for pharmaceutical manufacturing and life-science tools. A Ph.D. scientist who switched from mechanical engineering to engineering bacteria, she published first-author papers in Cell and Nature Biotechnology and was an early employee at Ginkgo Bioworks before starting Pando in 2022.
Josh Bilenker
Josh Bilenker is the CEO and co-founder of Treeline Biosciences, a Watertown, Massachusetts biotech building precision oncology medicines. A physician by training who once reviewed cancer drugs at the FDA, he founded Loxo Oncology in 2013 and took a tumor-agnostic, genomics-first approach he likened to 'moneyball' target selection. Loxo produced three FDA-approved medicines and was bought by Eli Lilly for roughly $8 billion in 2019. In 2021 he started Treeline with former Novartis research head Jeff Engelman, and in 2026 the company agreed to merge with Standard BioTools to go public as 'Treeline Biosciences' (Nasdaq: TRLN).
Josh Gruenstein
Josh Gruenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Tutor Intelligence, an MIT CSAIL spinout building AI-powered robots that work alongside people in American factories and warehouses. He leases robots by the hour instead of selling them, betting that fleet-scale learning, not bigger algorithms, is what finally puts a robot in every factory. In December 2025 the company raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $42M.