Hi Everyone 👋:

We're David, Andrew, and Vishnu, co-founders of 10x Science. We’re a team of researchers from Stanford on a mission to make drug development 10x faster.

TL;DR: We are building the AI-native solution to unlock fast, accurate, and scalable therapeutics characterization to accelerate drug development.

10x Science Launch Video

❌ The Problem

Protein-based drugs now make up a majority of new therapies and advances in AI are flooding the drug discovery pipeline with more candidates than ever. But the bottleneck isn't candidate design, it’s candidate characterization to identify the best drug for clinical trials.

Every antibody, every cell therapy, every engineered protein requires characterization at a level of molecular detail that existing tools simply weren't designed to handle. Today, that process is:

• Slow: Weeks to months per candidate spent on time-consuming data analysis and report generation that limit how fast new therapies can reach patients
• Expensive: On average, it costs $1M+ for each day of delay in a clinical trial. Every day a biologic is delayed from entering the market is a missed opportunity to generate revenue and to save lives
• Not scalable: Labs are throwing thousands of therapeutics through the discovery pipeline, but processing the data requires individuals to perform expert analysis leading to reproducibility challenges and a specialized, manual bottleneck

The result: candidates pile up, timelines slip, and the promise of AI-powered discovery gets stuck.

💡Our Solution

10x Science is the unlock 🔑

What if you could go from raw data to output-ready characterization reports in minutes? That’s what we’re building: AI-native infrastructure for protein characterization:

• Reduce analysis time from weeks to minutes: our platform automates the data crunching that currently bottlenecks development → yielding $150,000+ time savings per team / month
• Get reproducible, enterprise-ready results without requiring extensive expertise and slow manual curation. This frees scientists to focus on the important stuff: discovery, not number crunching
• Scale your pipeline: process more candidates exponentially without linearly scaling your team

Now, therapeutics development can keep pace with AI-powered drug discovery.

📜 Backstory

We've lived this problem.

As Stanford researchers building frontier tools at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and machine learning, we constantly hit the protein characterization throughput wall. We and every other scientist we’ve spoken with all feel the same pain: protein characterization is slow, manual, and just hard to do at scale. Today’s scientists are drowning in data. A single sample can generate gigabytes of data, yet extracting insights from it is painstakingly slow without the right tools.

If we don’t modernize protein analysis, then drug development grinds to a halt. This is why we started 10x Science.

🔬 Our Team

We are the only team in the world with deep expertise in proteomics, mass spectrometry, chemical biology, and artificial intelligence to tackle this problem. We’re researchers from Stanford with 18+ years of hands-on experience characterizing biologics and building new technologies and methodologies at the cutting edge.

David (CEO, middle): Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Fellow; Stanford Postdoc from Carolyn Bertozzi’s Lab (2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry); early career leader in field of mass spectrometry-based proteomics with 37+ peer-reviewed publications

Andrew (COO, right): Trained in Steven Carr’s Proteomics Platform Lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he developed new methods in mass spectrometry. Later became a Ph.D. student and NSF-GRFP fellow at Stanford University, where he was co-advised by Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi and Dr. Or Gozani.

Vishnu (CTO, left): 2x YC founder. Built AI for go-to-market teams as the 2nd hire and founding engineer at Nooks. Forward deployed himself in research labs at the University of Washington, UCSF, and Stanford, where he was mentored by world-renowned scientists in analytical chemistry and cancer research. In < 1 year, he published 2 papers and won 4 national awards.

We are uniquely positioned with the technical expertise and insights required to solve this major challenge.

🌐 The Big Picture

We are automating the whole data analysis pipeline to enable scientists to focus on discovery: this is the "why" rather than the "how" of data processing. Every major therapeutic breakthrough of the last decade has depended on understanding proteins at the molecular level. And yet, the tools we use to analyze them haven't fundamentally changed in over twenty years. 10x Science is taking a totally new approach to usher in an AI-forward paradigm in protein characterization and drug development.

🙏 Our Ask

We're onboarding customers. If you answer "yes" to any of these, we'd love to chat:

Know a pharma/biotech team working on biologics characterization?

Know an academic lab or core facility doing protein analysis?

Know a contract research organization (CRO) looking to scale analytical capabilities?

Resonate with our mission? → Share this post!

—David, Andrew, Vishnu (10x Science)