CEO Surbhi Sarna’s small team at Collate so far includes founding chief architect Jigish Patel and co-founder and CTO Nate Smith.
Gary Sexton Photography
Surbhi Sarna sold her latest startup, nVision Medical, for $275 million. She’s now leaving her role as an associate at Y Combinator to launch Collate, a startup aimed at automating the tedious parts of running a life sciences company.
When Surbhi Sarna decided to raise funds for her ovarian cancer detection startup more than a decade ago, she faced a long struggle. A solo founder shortly after college at the time, she raised $500,000 for nVision Medical in 18 months and got to work. nVision had raised just $17 million in total by the time Sarna sold it to medical device giant Boston Scientific for $275 million in 2018.
It’s a different story with Sarna’s second startup, Collate, announced today at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference. Collate comes out of stealth with $30 million in seed funding led by Redpoint that values the fledgling company at over $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 partner since 2021.
Sarna is leaving Y Combinator to build Collate, she said Forbesto seize the opportunity to use artificial intelligence to solve one of the biggest problems of a life sciences company: paperwork. Companies that make drugs or medical devices must produce reams of documentation on everything from research and clinical trials to product development, manufacturing and labels, Sarna said. Using generative AI tools, these companies can automate much of the process, speeding up the development of potentially life-saving drugs, she added.
“I realized there was an opportunity here, but it could only be launched by someone who both lived this documentation day in and day out and also understood the power of AI,” Sarna said . “If I talk to customers, they tell me they would use it immediately. »
Sarna has remained quiet about what she was building until today, partly because of her role at Y Combinator and partly for competitive reasons. The company today has no customers or commercial product. But Collate will look to sign two or three large life sciences clients in the coming months, said Midas List investor Satish Dharmaraj, who led the investment for Redpoint.
“It’s going to be a low velocity sale and high contract value, but it’s going to be very tricky, and every company will get a lot of value from it,” Dharmaraj said. “We can grow within each company, moving from project to project and department to department. »
Sarna didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a CEO – she wanted to solve a personal problem. When she was 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 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 saw as a “women’s issue,” she told Forbes in a 2018 profile. After trying to raise money for over a year, she finally put together $250,000 in funding, which was sliced over time to reduce investor risk.
An old one from 2014 Forbes 30 Under 30 List, Sarna successfully developed the first and only FDA-cleared device to collect cells from the fallopian tubes, providing potential early diagnosis of ovarian cancer, the fifth leading cause of cancer death in women. She was 32 when she completed the sale of nVision to Boston Scientific, where she then spent two years. She then joined YC, first as a visiting associate and then as a group associate (now called a general partner) to lead its organic practice in 2021.
At Y Combinator, Sarna helped push the accelerator to support more life sciences startups and engage with its community through more events. “She has funded some very large companies that we are going to continue to support,” said Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, also a personal investor in Collate. “She came from a background that was pretty specialized in biomedical devices, and I like to think that during her time at YC she became someone who could also work on software.”
But Sarna always knew she wanted to create another startup. Once she saw the opportunity in a startup like Collate – and, at 39, with her two children old enough to attend school during the day – she made the decision to step away from YC to continue his activity full time. “Creating documents for the life sciences industry can seem super boring, and it’s not a sexy thing to work on,” she said. “But it’s a massive opportunity, and it’s impossible to achieve with deterministic code.” You needed big language models.
To launch Collate, Sarna teamed up with Nate Smith, another former YC visiting partner who co-founded the recruiting platform Lever, acquired by Employ Inc. in 2022. Sarna and Smith were catching up at her house when her 8-year-old son years playing accidental recruiter, they said, asking both of them: “Is this another co-founder discussion?”
Neither entrepreneur expected the other to seek a partner, but the question sparked a conversation that led Smith, 40, to become chief technology officer. “It was very organic and very cute,” he said.
Although many companies are using AI to automate parts of the health care system — including using LLMs in drug discovery itself — Collate’s scale gives it an advantage, its supporters said. “Everyone who owns a tool today will say it’s an AI tool. There are a lot of players in these niches,” said Josh Kopelman of the first round. “If the average company we work with has to create 5,000 documents, failure (for Surbhi) creates 2,000. Surbhi wants to create all 5,000.”
With $30 million in the bank, Collate now needs to develop its product and hire engineers; Sarna said she and Smith plan to hire quickly with the initial war chest larger than usual. “At this point, I’m very clear on the type of culture I want to build and the type of people I want to surround myself with. “It’s one of the greatest joys and privileges of starting your own business,” she said. “This time we’re going to be a lot faster and I’ll be more precise.”
