In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at cancer breakthroughs from the ASCO conference, Clear’s move into healthcare, Harrison.ai’s U.S. expansion, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
Collate’s Surbhi Sarna
Cody Pickens for Forbes
Just 17 months after emerging from stealth, two-time entrepreneur and former Y Combinator partner Surbhi Sarna has raised $95 million for Collate, which developed AI tools to automate life sciences paperwork, at a valuation approaching $1 billion. Redpoint Ventures led the deal, which brings Collate’s total funding to $125 million.
“Life sciences strategy and documentation is going to be the AI battleground of 2026, the same way it was for legal in 2025,” Sarna tells Forbes. That’s been a booming opportunity, and legal AI startup Harvey is now worth $11 billion.
As the technology upends paperwork of all kinds, life sciences companies–which are drowning in documents for regulatory filings, clinical trials and product development–are a ripe target. Collate’s timing was auspicious: Not so early that the AI models weren’t good enough, but late enough that a number of life sciences firms had already tried building AI capabilities and realized they’d be better off outsourcing, she says.
Since signing its first customer in May 2025, the San Francisco-based startup has signed on some 50 more, including big pharmaceutical companies, major medical device manufacturers and publicly traded biotech firms. “We started working with some of the largest life sciences companies the same year we launched,” Sarna says. “Everyone is completely keyed into the problem.”
Redpoint’s Satish Dharmaraj, who led the investment, says that he believes life sciences documentation could be an even larger opportunity than legal. “In the life sciences world, there are these big, big enterprise companies,” Dharmaraj says. “You will get a big pharma company and grow like a weed inside.”
Sarna, who is 40 and an alum of the 2014 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, started her first business because of her own health issues: ovarian cysts so painful they made her faint, and doctors who couldn’t tell her if they were cancerous. She struggled to raise funds for that ovarian cancer detection startup, called NVision Medical, in its early days, then sold it to Boston Scientific for $275 million in 2018.
With Collate, which Forbes profiled last year as it emerged from stealth, it was a different story. Having a successful exit and a stint as a YC partner, she and her cofounder Nate Smith, another former YC visiting partner who had cofounded recruiting platform Lever, raised $30 million in seed funding from top investors, including Redpoint, First Round and Conviction Partners. The startup’s valuation at the time: more than $100 million—despite being so early that it didn’t yet have a commercial product or customers. Forbes subsequently featured the company on the 2025 Next Billion-Dollar Startups list.
“She knew what the problems are and she knows how to solve them using LLMs,” investor Dharmaraj says.
The paperwork in life sciences is both tedious and staggering. Some regulatory submissions can run to 10,000 pages, for example, including an amount of clinical data that AI can parse faster than any human being possibly could. Sarna says that Collate is seeing time savings of 50% to 90%, and that a document that might have taken seven months previously may now be able to be completed in a month or less. That’s critical in an industry where the paperwork for clinical trials and regulatory filings is a bottleneck in bringing new therapies to market
While errors and hallucinations are an issue for AI, she says that Collate’s accuracy is above 90% and often closer to 97%, and that as a safeguard the company requires human verification of documents before they’re exported from its system. “That might not sound sexy, but it’s important,” she says. “I wanted to introduce AI and documentation to the industry in a way that I thought was patient safe.”
Sarna now believes that in the next six to nine months, the majority of the world’s life sciences companies are going to sign deals to use AI for all this paperwork, whether with Collate or with someone else. “It’s bananas,” she says of the customer interest and potential growth trajectory. “If you are a founder worth your salt, you are never going to say no. You and your team are going to figure it out.”
After Conquering Airports, Clear Is Moving Into Healthcare
Caryn Seidman Becker
Guerin Blask for Forbes
Caryn Seidman Becker built Clear into a profitable airport terminal mainstay, raking in $900 million in revenue and $168 million in net income in 2025 from its biometric security business. Now a billionaire worth $1.1 billion from her stake in the business, she’s got her sights set on a potentially bigger target: Healthcare.
It’s early days for Clear’s non-airport business. The financial figures are so small the company doesn’t break them out on its balance sheet. But it’s growing fast.
Major hospital groups in Georgia, New York, New Jersey and Louisiana have all signed on to integrate Clear. A popular application: scanning people’s faces to confirm their identities when they check into a doctor’s office, undergo surgery or receive chemotherapy. New Jersey’s Hackensack Meridian, which owns 18 hospitals, also uses Clear to speed up password recovery for patients’ MyChart accounts. And in December, Clear landed a $6 million contract with Medicare so that new enrollees can sign into their accounts using a selfie, no password needed.
Read more here.
Harrison.ai Is Targeting The U.S. For Its Next Expansion
Aengus Tran was in his final year of medical school in his native Vietnam, when he launched clinical AI service provider Harrison.ai with his brother, Dimitry, then-head of innovation at an Australian hospital, in 2018. They developed AI software capable of analyzing chest X-rays and CT scans of the chest and brain, flagging critical cases and generating draft reports. The company (which has raised more than $240 million) says its software can cut diagnostic report turnaround times by up to 40% in time-critical cases and boost overall reporting speeds by 10%.
Radiology has been one of the first big clinical use cases for AI, where it both helps to enhance images and saves time. Today, more than 3,400 clinicians in over 1,000 hospitals and clinics across 40 countries use Harrison.ai’s software. Its two biggest markets are Australia, where it says it serves half the country’s roughly 3,200 registered radiologists, and the U.K., where it assesses more than 40% of all chest X-rays for NHS England, part of the U.K.’s National Health Service.
Now Tran, 32 and an alum of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list, is targeting the United States for what he believes could be the company’s biggest expansion. “We’ve already built a very comprehensive AI that makes 455 different diagnoses and has been battle-tested,” Tran says. “The U.S. is our next corridor.”
Read more here.
Cancer Breakthroughs From ASCO
When Dr. Brian Wolpin of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute announced the dramatic results of Revolution Medicine’s pancreatic cancer drug at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, 9,000 oncologists stood up and cheered. Pancreatic cancer has long been one of the worst diagnoses a person could get. And RevMed’s phase 3 clinical trial, first announced in April, showed that patients with metastatic cancer who took its targeted pill, daraxonrasib, lived nearly twice as long as those who were offered chemotherapy, or a median of 13.2 months versus 6.7 months.
Even at ASCO, the big event for announcing cancer breakthroughs, there was nothing else that lived up to that moment. Still, there were other important results. Among them:
- Moderna and Merck released five-year follow-up data from a clinical trial of late-stage melanoma patients who received Moderna’s cancer vaccine called Intismeran autogene in combination with Merck’s oncology drug Keytruda. Patients who received the combination had a 49% lower risk of death or recurrence compared to those who received Keytruda alone
- San Francisco-based Veracyte released data from an independent study led by University College London, showing that its Prosigna test successfully identified high-risk breast cancer patients who can safely avoid chemotherapy, enabling them to avoid significant side effects without compromising their health. The company launched the test commercially in the U.S. earlier this week.
- In other breast cancer news, two new studies from Dana-Farber help build a case that antibody-drug conjugate Todelvy (marketed by Gilead) should be the first treatment for patients with advanced triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly aggressive and deadly form of the disease, who aren’t eligible for immunotherapy. Bristol Myers Squib also shared positive data from a phase 3 trial of its antibody drug conjugate for triple negative breast cancer.
- In a closely watched study, Akeso and Summit Therapeutics released data finding that their drug ivonescimab with chemotherapy cut the risk of death by 34% in patients with non-small cell lung cancer than Tevimbra (made by BeOne Medicines) plus chemo, which is the current standard of care in Europe. (Read more about Akeso in our 2025 profile of cofounder and CEO Michelle Xia.)
Deal of the Week
Longevity startup NewLimit, raised $435 million at a valuation of $3.1 billion, triple its valuation of a year ago. The San Francisco-based company, cofounded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, is developing products it says can reverse aging, starting with related conditions, as the FDA doesn’t recognize aging per se as a disease.
The company doesn’t yet have any products on the market, but it plans to take its lead drug candidate, for patients with alcohol-related liver disease, into clinical trials next year with the new funds. Other candidates in its pipeline are aimed at rheumatoid arthritis and chronic kidney disease.
Its therapeutic approach aims to take advantage of proteins that regulate gene expression in cells. Four of them, so-called “Yamanaka factors” can fully restart the clock on living cells, turning them into stem cells, a process also used in developing cell therapies. NewLimit plans to pause this mid-process, restoring cells to a more youthful state without changing them.
The company is one of a handful of billionaire-backed longevity startups, including Retro Biosciences (seeded by Sam Altman) and Altos Labs (backed by Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner).
WHAT WE’RE READING
Inside Vladimir Putin’s $26 billion longevity push, which includes mini-pigs, organ printing and cryotherapy.
Garner Health reached a $2.7 billion valuation–nearly double the $1.4 billion it was at when we profiled it in February.
Blood pressure tech from companies that include Oura and Samsung floods the market after the FDA relaxes oversight of wearables.
More than $100 billion was billed for questionable vascular procedures, according to a government watchdog report.
Hospitals and doctors are seeing a resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases like whooping cough and meningitis.
Under Trump’s effort to control funds for his political agenda, researchers who get federal grants would face limits on the subjects they can explore and foreign labs they can collaborate with.
Moderna is expanding its collaboration with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to develop a vaccine against the strain of Ebola at the center of the current outbreak in Congo.