Biotech Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area 2025

Notable Labs is building a personalized drug discovery platform to identify treatment options for relapsed and refractory cancer patients — starting with blood cancer — to address the long tail of cancer treatment. We look at a person’s actual cancer cells, test combinations of FDA approved drugs, and see which combinations kill the cancer cells and leave the healthy cells alive. We focus on combinations because cancer is often difficult to target with just one drug and starting with a single drug can lead to resistant clones or relapse. We're building a highly automated lab in Foster City running on our custom software and are currently testing relapsed/refractory cancer patients as well as samples from a variety of pharma/biotech partnerships. https://www.notablelabs.com/careers

We make oral drugs to treat and prevent viral infections - like COVID-19.

Biotechnology is rewriting life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the crops we grow, the materials we wear, and the household goods that we rely on every day. Biotech R&D is radically transforming our world, but to move at the new speed of science, scientists need better technology. Benchling’s mission is to unlock the power of biotechnology. The world’s biotech leaders and innovators use our R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products and accelerate time to milestone and market.

Our vision is to provide regenerative medicine treatments that free patients from chronic liver disease and help usher in an era where diseased and damaged tissues can be repaired.

Verge uses artificial intelligence and human data to develop better drugs faster. Verge has an end-to-end technology-driven drug discovery and development platform, featuring one of the field’s largest and most comprehensive proprietary patient genomics datasets from human tissue. Verge uses machine learning to mine this data and develops these insights into new drugs using it’s human-centric biology and chemistry platforms.

We're developing a free vaccine to cure HIV and AIDs. Immunity Project is a non-profit initiative dedicated to developing an HIV vaccine. We hacked the HIV life cycle to develop a vaccine that gives you the same power as HIV controllers. With success in our clinical trials, our goal is to give our vaccine away to the world for free.

Synvivia applies chemical control over cell behavior. This allows us to optimize biomanufacturing of high-value biopharmaceutical products.

iollo is an at-home metabolomics test to extend your healthy lifespan. We measure more than 500 biomarkers in blood and use AI to automatically match you with dietary, behavioral, and therapeutic interventions.

GEn1E Lifesciences is a Clinical-stage, multi-target company with a unique AI platform. We develop novel, next-generation, immunomodulatory therapies for rare & inflammatory diseases with no effective treatments. Our team is supercharging the drug development cycle by applying AI to multiple-mechanism-of-action protein targets and their natural platform capabilities—creating novel therapeutics at an unprecedented pace. Our AI platform has enabled us to develop a purpose-built therapy for ARDS to reduce its $20 billion cost on society (just in the USA). GEn1E has built a rich pipeline of 21+ novel and selective immunomodulators and has plans to accelerate 2 additional devastating diseases (beyond their lead indication) to IND in the next 12 months. Our AI platform enables tremendous pace and capital efficiency as demonstrated by our progress in ~2 years with seed capital—a stark contrast to the typical spend of $100M+ and 7+ years exhibited in the pharmaceuticals / biotech industry. With ~90% of rare diseases having no therapeutic treatment at all, GEn1E is taking a giant swing that will hopefully bring life-saving therapies to the lives of patients in need. The team at GEn1E has decades of experience in drug development and machine learning. We graduated from YCombinator and Stanford-StartX in late 2019. We are based in Palo Alto, CA.

Catena’s technology lets us attach any two proteins together using an enzyme and the native amino acids tyrosine and cysteine within target proteins. It is a true platform technology because it enables the joining of any two soluble proteins together with minimal engineering and without restrictions due to protein size or complexity. Our work has already been used to modify cancer specific antibodies, CRISPR proteins and even cell surfaces. Our ability to produce modular protein therapeutics in a fraction of the time allows for true library creation across the therapeutics spectrum from oncology, vaccines, inflammatory disease and beyond.

We build software to manage, analyze, and optimize bioprocessing data. Our initial customers are bio-industrial companies, who produce various products in bioreactors.

Asher Bio is a biotechnology company developing precisely targeted immunotherapies for cancer and other diseases. Our cis-targeting platform aims to enable selective activation of specific immune cell types, addressing the inherent limitations of otherwise pleiotropic immunotherapies that act on multiple cell types. Our approach has the potential to precisely direct different immune mediators against a range of target immune cell-types and create best-in-class immunotherapies in cancer, autoimmune and infectious diseases. Asher Bio is backed by Third Rock Ventures and is located in South San Francisco.

YourChoice Therapeutics is revolutionizing the global contraceptive market. Our vision is to develop non-hormonal contraceptives to provide both women and men with birth control options that lack the associated risks of hormone-based options but are equally effective. Traditionally, it has been the women’s financial and health burden to have a contraceptive in place. Our first goal is therefore to bring a novel non-hormonal, on-demand and low cost female contraceptive to the market that will substantially improve their quality of life and well-being. Our second goal is to develop the first ever non-surgical and highly effective non-hormonal contraceptive for men. Currently, male contraception is limited to two main options – vasectomy or condoms. Having such options available to both women and men will globally allow for much better family planning, reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies including abortions and therefore reduce costs and ensure contraceptive health and well-being.

Atomwise is a preclinical tech-enabled biotech using machine learning for hit discovery, hit expansion, and lead optimization. We were the first team to apply convolutional neural networks to drug discovery. We focus on identifying and optimizing novel small molecule scaffolds and unlocking previously-undrugged protein targets.

We are developing a drug to increase metabolism and burn calories without exercise. Obesity and type 2 diabetes have reached epidemic proportions. There are 2.2B overweight people and 500M people with type 2 diabetes worldwide, and these numbers increase drastically every year. Existing drugs are not effective enough to reverse the trend. Our drug can solve this problem, because it addresses the root cause of metabolic disorders – the imbalance between caloric intake and expenditure. Our drug will target mitochondria – the powerhouse of the cell – to generate heat. This approach has been proven to fully reverse obesity and type 2 diabetes in animals. However, therapeutic application for humans was impossible, because mitochondrial heat production could only be induced by highly artificial methods with side effects. This changed after our recent breakthrough discovery of the protein that mitochondria naturally use to generate heat. We have developed a unique high-throughput drug discovery platform to identify compounds that selectively activate this target protein, without side effects. For decades people have wanted a drug that burns calories like exercise does. We are realizing this dream at Equator Therapeutics.

Founded in 2012, Transcriptic has developed the first robotic cloud lab platform for on-demand life science research. It’s powered by the Transcriptic Common Lab Environment (TCLE) a scalable, digital infrastructure that integrates laboratory processes, instruments and IoT technologies into a single user interface. Researchers can carry out scalable, reproducible and rapid experimentation from anywhere in the world. Top ten pharmaceutical companies, as well as emerging biotech companies, are using the platform to gain more reproducibility and flexibility in the design and control of their experiments. By leveraging cloud-based technologies, users can access the power of a fully automated laboratory – whether in their own labs through an on-premise deployment of TCLE or through Transcriptic’s Bioassays services – all through a simple web-based interface. Transcriptic is transforming drug discovery and synthetic biology research by helping scientists focus on accelerating discoveries instead of labor-intensive bench work.

Culture Biosciences grows cells for biotech companies. Our customers genetically modify organisms to produce new therapeutics, materials, fuels and foods. We help them quickly run experiments and develop manufacturing processes so they can get their products to market faster. We've built proprietary software and automation systems to make operating our bioreactors more efficient than existing systems. We also provide customers with new software tools that help them analyze and contextualize their data. We are currently serving a number of biotech customers and scaling out our infrastructure.

Altay develops small molecule drugs to treat chronic liver diseases like liver fibrosis and liver cancer. Our co-founder Dr. Osman Ozes, led the first drug development program for Esbriet (Pirfenidone), resulting in the first FDA approved therapy for lung fibrosis. Esbriet is now a $1 billion/year drug and has already made over $6 billion in revenue. With a team that has over 70+ years of small molecule drug development experience, we intend to do the same with chronic liver diseases, which affects over 20 million Americans and represents a market size of over $30 billion. We know we are well positioned for success because we have shown excellent pre-clinical mouse data in several liver fibrosis models using our novel small molecule. We demonstrate a reduction in fibrosis with our drug, but more significantly, we show a reversal in fibrotic tissue back to normal tissue. With our current developmental strategy, we hope to have a clinic-ready compound by the end of 2021 and be in phase I clinical trials by mid of 2022.

Ansa Biotechnologies is developing a new way to make DNA that will be faster, cleaner, and more accurate than existing methods. Currently, DNA is manufactured via a chemical method that has remained mostly unchanged for 35 years. Our enzyme-based approach promises to dramatically accelerate innovation in biological research and biotechnology, including therapeutics, diagnostics and biomanufacturing.

Developing the next generation of psychedelic therapeutics for mental health indications. We design novel altered states of consciousness using machine learning, human experiential data, and molecular pharmacology.

Our mission -To ensure current and future generations have access to clean soil, water & air. -To protect and restore earth's beautiful and diverse ecosystems. -To undo the harm of industrial activity on the planet and ensure future industrial activities are more sustainable. Our research -We develop new bio-based solutions that break down and remove toxic chemicals from the environment.  We also develop bioreactor based solutions which remove toxins from industrial production pipelines, ensuring contaminants are never released into the environment. -To do this, we've partnered with Nature. Specifically, we have harnessed the power of one of Nature's smallest but most powerful technologies: enzymes. Enzymes are everywhere. They break down the food in your stomach, remove dirt from your clothes, and make our beer. At BluumBio, we look for enzymes found in bacteria, algae, plants and other living organisms that naturally degrade toxic chemicals. We then make these enzymes work better in the lab and come up with develop new applications for these technologies.

Rosebud Biosciences accelerates drug development by screening drugs against organoids (micro-organs) that have the same gene mutations as the patients. We partner with therapeutics companies to screen their drugs, and we perform our own drug discovery for rare diseases that have no existing treatments. Our organoids are also fetal-like and enable discovery of novel drug targets for pediatric diseases. This technology was validated at Stanford, published in a prestigious journal, and has already led to the discovery of a drug target in a pediatric heart disease that could not have been found using traditional disease models.

Engage Bio is developing mRNA immunotherapies to defeat cancer. Our founders have deep experience in immunotherapy development, including four drugs in the clinic, and in building mRNA therapeutics platforms. Our approach is to provide cancer cells with instructions to make and gradually release our drugs within solid tumors. This local therapy allows us to eliminate tumors while sparing healthy distant tissues.

HypaHub is a Cloud-Based Bioinformatics and AI Platform. It is the first HIPAA-compliant Bioinformatics SaaS that runs natively on users' clouds, providing both operation- and price-transparency. Our product is a one-stop shop to access complex technologies designed for scientists building data applications or performing data analytics to extract insights. It automates the creation and manages the operation of computing resources, eliminating the need for enterprises to set up and maintain a high-end R&D cloud infrastructure.

Our compounds disrupt the metabolic and inflammatory triggers in both cancer and quasi-cancerous cells in the tumor microenvironment. By impacting multiple cell types, we are enabling effective, lasting cancer treatments.

Alga Biosciences is a fast-moving startup focused on transforming the agricultural industry. Our mission is to make an immediate, dramatic impact on global methane emissions produced by enteric fermentation in partnership with the cattle industry. We believe in leveraging biology to tackle the world’s biggest problems.

One Codex is a data platform for applied microbial genomics, enabling new and valuable applications in clinical diagnostics, food safety, and biosecurity. Acquired by Invitae (NVTA) in February 2021. Spun out as an independent company in September 2022.

Science Exchange powers R&D outsourcing for the world’s top life sciences companies. Our marketplace gives scientists access to the innovation and research they need and our platform fully automates R&D outsourcing from source to pay so scientists can focus on what they love—science.

Loop Genomics provides long-read sequencing solutions across a diverse set of research and clinical applications. Our platform for long-read DNA sequencing transforms short-read DNA sequencers into long-read sequencing machines.