Biotechnology Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Ritivel is an AI-native workspace for regulatory and medical writing teams at life sciences companies. Our AI agents draft CTDs, CSRs, INDs, and BLAs in minutes instead of weeks, helping drugs reach patients faster. Every month a drug is delayed from reaching the market costs pharma companies ~$45M in lost revenue and more importantly, delays treatment for thousands of patients who need it. Yet regulatory teams are stuck in a painful, months-long process: synthesizing thousands of pages of clinical data, hunting through SharePoint folders for the right documents, chasing colleagues for missing inputs, and manually drafting submissions. Ritivel deploys AI agents that transform how regulatory teams work. Our agents generate comprehensive first drafts directly in Microsoft Word, following FDA formatting requirements and pulling from your existing clinical data and prior submissions. Every data point includes citations linked back to the original source, so reviewers can verify with one click. Connected to SharePoint and Veeva, our agents automatically source the right documents. Integrated with Outlook, they handle reminder emails and follow-ups automatically. We're engineers who previously built AI copilots at Microsoft Research. After 50+ conversations with pharma professionals, we discovered the critical bottleneck in regulatory submissions and built Ritivel to solve it.

We’re building AI agents that speed up drug trials by automating the manual consolidation and document prep required for every IND submission. Today, biotechs spend months stitching together reports from contractors and internal teams just to file and get to their first-in-human trial.

What if you could train a biological foundation model on... the entire internet? Exonic is pioneering a new generation of biological foundation models, focused on heterogeneous, unstructured, and noisy datasets. Our first application is the design of safer gene therapies. In 2025, we used AI to set a new state of the art in liver cancer targeted gene therapy, validated in vitro in our lab in San Francisco. So far in 2026, we have trained a new model with unprecedented zero-shot generalization on genomic regulatory expression in hold-out biosample datasets. More to be shared soon.

Our founder Noah, an experienced tech entrepreneur, was directly impacted by a severe genetic disease when his daughter was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome, a disease that afflicts 1 in 10,000 girls. Using an innovative polytherapy strategy, we’ve successfully improved her quality of life, and have designed new therapeutics that each could be worth billions and together could deliver a cure.

🦠🤖 We use our computational models to make next-generation antibiotics that outcompete bacterial evolution and precisely target pathogenic bacteria, without harming good microbes or human cells. ☠️ Current antibiotics stop working because bacteria evolve resistance to them. This makes drug-resistant bacteria a looming global health crisis - already killing more people than malaria and AIDS and it is getting exponentially worse 📈. 🧬 Our approach leverages co-evolutionary protein-protein interaction datasets combined with AI to forecast bacterial mutations and create ‘future-proof’ antibiotics, addressing antibiotic resistance before it develops. This changes the game for how frequently society will need to make new antibiotics and how long our new antibiotics will be able to treat patients 👩‍⚕️. We are a team of biochemists and evolutionary biologists who met at the University of Oxford.

The future of mRNA therapeutics is hampered by manufacturing challenges and unless solved, its exciting potential may never be realised. Sensible enables the next generation of mRNA medicines by turning living cells into factories producing abundant, highly stable and non-immunogenic mRNA in a scalable and cost-effective way.

Eugit Therapeutics targets the issue of non-specific drugs that cause toxicity and clinical trial failures, affecting millions with tissue-specific inflammatory diseases. TAGHOME delivers drugs with precision to diseased tissues using T cell receptors, enhancing safety and improving efficacy. Our initial focus is on the 3.1 million U.S. individuals with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, aiming to initiate clinical trials within two years. Cofounded by George Church (Harvard) and funded by Y Combinator (S22).

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.

SFA Therapeutics is creating therapeutically-tailored oral drugs that regulate the immune system; with a focus on autoimmune diseases and cancers that originate from chronic inflammation. There are over 300 million patients who suffer from autoimmune diseases. Our treatment is designed to block the root cause of many of these chronic inflammatory diseases, with safe oral drugs. We have strong clinical data from a phase 1b clinical trial in psoriasis, and human data in pancreatic cancer, uveitis and NASH. we have a total of 9 drugs in our pipeline and 15 patents.

Volta Labs is a genomics applications company that has developed a cutting-edge digital fluidics platform to maximize performance and scalability of sample preparation in genomics while providing unparalleled consistency. Volta is transforming the way biological research and analyses are performed, allowing scientists to focus on what they do best -- pushing the boundaries of biology. As a collective of scientists and builders working at the intersection of engineering and biology, we imagine a world where extracting vital information from biological samples is as simple as pressing a button. That's our vision, and we're turning it into reality. Our HQ is in Boston’s Seaport, where we develop and manufacture our technology. We believe in cross-functional collaboration and continuous learning – whether your interest is in biology, MechEng, CompEng, or simply joining a fast-growing startup striving to make the world a better place, we'd love to welcome you to our team. Check out some of our blog posts to learn more about work life at Volta.

Mytos builds robots for manufacturing human cells. Operators input stem cells, and our platform turns them into specific cells such as neurons and heart cells over multiple weeks. Last year, patients were cured of Parkinson’s, vision loss, and Type 1 diabetes using stem-cell derived cells. We need 1000x the global capacity to produce these cells, and treat millions of patients. But today these Regenerative Medicines are produced by hand, meaning they’re too expensive and don’t scale. Mytos has fully automated production of these cells, making it scalable. We have our first manufacturing deal - neurons for treating Parkinson’s - and we’re in conversations with majority of the other top players.

Solugen is decarbonizing the chemistry of everyday life with enzymes and innovative metal catalysts. Our new to the world Bioforge platform technology can produce high value chemical goods that are biobased and carbon negative, at cost on par with current technologies. We are making sustainable chemistry accessible to all living things, to ensure a prosperous world exists for generations.

Founded in 2010, Lygos is providing biotechnology solutions for today’s renewable chemical challenges. They engineer microbes to convert sugars into high-value, industrial chemicals, targeting compounds where biological production is cost-advantaged over petrochemical production.

Nexa is developing the solution for cattle monitoring, leveraging implantable microchips that collect more comprehensive biometrics than anything else on the market. Our accompanying AI-driven animal health engine empowers farmers with early disease detection, reproductive insights, GPS tracking, and more. We're saving farmers time and money while collecting the world's largest cattle health dataset. We believe that cattle farming should be a science, not an art - this will secure the world's food supply and increase economic output that billions of people depend on.