When Surbhi Sarna wanted to raise money for her ovarian cancer screening startup more than a decade ago, she faced a long struggle. At the time, a solo founder out of school, she raised $500,000 for nVision Medical in 18 months and received nVision had only raised $17 million in total by the time Sarna sold it to medical device giant Boston Scientific for $ 275 million in 2018.
Another story is that of Sarna’s second startup, Collate, announced at J. P. Morgan Healthcare. Collate walks away with $30 million in seed investment led through Redpoint that values the fledgling company at more than $100 million, a significant figure for such a young company. Venture capital firms First Round and Conviction Partners also participated, as well as Y Combinator, the startup accelerator of which Sarna has been a spouse since 2021.
Sarna is leaving Y Combinator to start Collate, he told Forbes, to seize the opportunity to use synthetic intelligence to solve one of a life sciences company’s biggest headaches: paperwork. Companies that make drugs or medical devices will have to produce a lot of documentation on everything from studies and clinical trials to product progression, production and labels, Sarna said. Using generative artificial intelligence tools, those corporations can automate much of the process, accelerating the progression of potentially life-saving drugs, he added.
“I learned that there is an opportunity here, but it may only come through someone who lived this documentation day in and day out and also understood the power of AI,” Sarna said. Array “If I contact customers, they tell me they would do it. ” Use it immediately. »
Sarna hasn’t said anything about what he’s building to this day, partly because of his role at Y Combinator and partly for competitive reasons. The company today has no consumers or advertising products. But Collate will look to attract two or three giant life sciences clients in the coming months, said Midas List investor Satish Dharmaraj, who led Redpoint’s investment.
“It will be a low-velocity sale and a maximum contract price, but it will be complicated, and either one or both companies will get a great price for it,” Dharmaraj said. “We can grow within both a single corporation, moving from assignment to assignment and branch to branch. “
Sarna didn’t grow up dreaming of being a CEO — she wanted to solve a personal problem. At age 13, she suffered from ovarian cysts so painful they made her faint, and doctors couldn’t tell her if they were cancerous. She founded nVision in 2009 in the Bay Area, while still working low-level day jobs in the medical device industry.
Sarna had to fight to be taken seriously, both as an entrepreneur and in building what some male investors considered a “women’s issue,” she detailed to Forbes in a 2018 profile. After trying to raise funds for more than a year, she finally scraped together $250,000 in funding, which was parceled out in tranches over time to reduce investors’ risk.
A former member of the 2014 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, Sarna effectively developed the first and only FDA-approved device to collect cells from the fallopian tubes, offering a prospective early diagnosis of ovarian cancer, the fifth leading cause of cancer death in women. He was 32 when he finished selling nVision to Boston Scientific, where he then spent two years. She then joined YC, first as a visiting associate and then as an associate of the organization (now called A). General Partner) to lead her Biological Practice in 2021.
At Y Combinator, Sarna helped drive the accelerator to help more life sciences startups and engage with their netpaintings through more events. “She’s funded some very large companies that we’ll continue to help,” said Garry Tan, president and chief executive of Y Combinator, also a private investor in Collate. “She came from a fairly specialized background in biomedical devices, and I like to think that during her time at YC she became someone who could also work with software. “
But Sarna knew he wanted to create another new company. When he saw the opportunity in a new company like Collate (and, at 39, with his two children old enough to be in school during the day), he made the decision to retire from YC to do it full time. “Creating fabrics for the life sciences industry can seem very boring and unappealing about which one to paint,” he said. “But it’s a huge opportunity and there’s no way to do it with a deterministic code. You needed great language models.
To launch Collate, Sarna teamed up with Nate Smith, another former YC visiting partner who cofounded recruiting platform Lever, which was acquired by Employ Inc. in 2022. Sarna and Smith were catching up at her house when her 8-year-old son played accidental recruiter, they said, asking them both: “Is this another cofounder discussion?”
Neither businessman expected the other to look for a partner, but the consultation sparked a verbal exchange that led Smith, 40, to become head of leadership generation. “It was very biological and very nice,” he said.
While there are numerous companies using AI to automate parts of the healthcare stack – including using LLMs in drug discovery itself – Collate’s breadth gives it an advantage, its supporters said. “Everybody who has a tool is going to say they are an AI tool today. There are lots of players around the niches,” said First Round’s Josh Kopelman. “If the average company we work with needs to create 5,000 documents, failure [for Surbhi] is creating 2,000. Surbhi wants to create all 5,000 of them.”
With $30 million in the bank, Collate now wants to expand its product and hire engineers; Sarna said she and Smith plan to rent temporarily with the larger-than-usual initial war fund. “At this point, I’m very transparent about the kind of culture I need to build and the kind of people I need to surround myself with. “It’s one of the greatest joys and privileges of starting your own business,” he said. “This time we’ll be a lot faster and I’ll be more precise.