There are now 141 bio and healthcare companies funded by YC | Hacker News Reader

There are now 141 bio and healthcare companies funded by YC

blog.ycombinator.com

59 pointssethbannon28 comments

Though the line of best fit seems to fit well to an exponential for now, it is likely a sigmoid in the end [0]. The real trick is figuring out when you've reached the 50% mark, as any physiologist will tell you! ;)

Also, I might as well mention that I'm a recent bio-eng grad that posts in the 'Who's hiring?' threads still. Details in my profile page. And, sorry to be so blatantly self promoting.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

And congrats to Ginko on recent $120M deal with Cronos Group. Engineering yeast strains that can produce full-spectrum of cannabinoids via fermentation at factory scale. Really exciting!

https://thecronosgroup.com/investor-relations/

Mind explaining what this means and why it's exciting?

Maybe some Ginko peeps can chime in ;) But I'm very impressed with the scale. $100M is ballpark scale of all cannabis US research funding per annum.

And most trials investigate CBD, THC. There are hundreds of other cannabinoid compounds worth investigating. Providing high quality samples to researchers will result in discoveries. A single cannabis breakthrough treatment changes the entire game. Plus, expertise for Ginko with synthesizing cannabinoids conceivably translates to opiods and myriad other medicinal plants compounds.

"I define “bio” at YC as anything enabled by biology and anything in healthcare."

Is that a common definition? I haven't consider healthcare companies as bio.

I'd be interested in the list of the 141, unsure if I'm the only one.

I'd be interested in the 141 as well, but since my interpretation of the post is to highlight that bio and hard tech companies are actively funded by YC (and have been for years), I think the permissive definition is probably appropriate.

Okay, thought I would try to answer my own question. We write software[1] that helps research labs save money and here are companies that I'd consider bio:

Sorry if missing some:

Glowing Plant, S14

Ginko Bioworks, S14

Notable Labs, W15

Transcriptic, W15

Industrial Microbes, W15

Lygos, W16

C16 Biosciences, S18

CB Therapeutics, S18

Cytera CellWorks, S18

Hepatx, S18

Borderline:

HistoWiz, W16

Forever Labs, S17

Ambercycle, F2

[1] Lab Spend - https://labspend.com

And yet no cure for cancer!

I kid, but actually there are a few YC companies literally working on cures for cancer, and every time I see one I think, "That's the kid of swing for the fences YC is known for, good luck to them!".

Really excited to hear this now!! I've been watching the job postings appear for HumanDx and I'm looking forward to what the YC companies can achieve together. I think in healthcare it's particularly important to understand the "user(s)." YC companies have a great opportunity to use smart startup techniques to make healthcare more accessible and more successful.

If you're interested, YC maintains a list of all the public (ie launched) companies. You can sort by category as well: http://www.ycombinator.com/companies

If you don't have a lab you are not into bio.

That said there are a lot of companies that are trying real hard to replace their labs with software.

Is there a list of these somewhere?

The closest thing I could find was this list: https://yclist.com/

A ctrl+F of "bio" gave me a few results.

Nice! Very interesting to see the failures also...

it would be interesting to see what these 141 companies be able to accomplish if combined

That's nice. But can someone list out the notable ones which have solved important problems.

woohoo!

"I define “bio” at YC as anything enabled by biology and anything in healthcare. In healthcare, this includes medical devices, tools, therapeutics, diagnostics, and healthcare IT"

Healthcare IT... not what I would think of as Bio.

As noted in the quote if it is "anything in healthcare" that just seems like, healthcare.

You can have non-healthcare applications of biology (e.g. agriculture, materials) and non-bio applications in healthcare (e.g. patient management systems). It’s not a great definition.

Diagnostics and therapeutics are largely (completely?) bio-based. It generally requires a great deal of cellular and/or genomic research. Medical devices also involve some heavy biology related research.

However, healthcare IT generally has nothing to do with biology.

I had this thought at first too, but there's a more granular breakdown: 74% healthcare, of which 34% are IT, 28% are diagnostics, 24% are therapeutics, 14% are devices.

Using that info, taking what I consider the most reasonable strict approach (exclude IT, diagnostics, and devices), you'd exclude ~64% of the defined companies.

Without a complete listing of the companies considered, it's hard to gauge how strict you'd need to be in order to be precise, but since the point of this post is to highlight that bio and hard tech companies are being actively funded by YC and have been for a while now, I think the author's assumptions were pretty reasonable.

Ok, we've added "and healthcare" to the title above.

I don't have any experience in Healthcare IT but I'm curious why you say you wouldn't think of that as bio?

I work at a bioinformatics lab and have been surprised by the big disconnect between the mountains of real-time clinical data produced by healthcare each day, versus the relative trickle of data we get in our lab (after IRB, et cetera).

Seems like there is a lot of room for innovation in Healthcare IT that could connect to bio-research and make the whole research system more like modern software updates versus the box software(research papers) of the 80's.

I would assume this is not as simple as it looks.

A lot of the data is simply noise; of the part that might be useful, a lot would contain proprietary information that companies would be reluctant to part with. A huge part of the data is generated but never captured digitally

@breck -

I'm working on some projects that are tangential to this on both sided and I'd love to hear your thoughts on connecting healthcare IT to bio-research. What kind of healthcare data would you be looking to receive on the bio-research side? and what features of "modern software updates" are most important to you (regularly scheduled like MS Patch Tuesday? seamless in the background like SaaS products?)? do you think of this data as inputs to your research or living next to your research?

Thanks!

Well a large 1M Homo sapiens multiomics dataset with 100+ clinical variables would be great. :) ... the data gets more and more interesting the more variables you have, but generally all the government datasets reduce number of variables for privacy reasons. That’s why if perhaps there was a way to get access to the quantity of data on something like GEO or TCGA, but with full clinical, from healthcare providers, you might find some interesting things.

I would like to see more research as dashboards more than research as reports. The book “The Half-life of Facts” is relevant: many bio conclusions we’ve made in the past hundred years seems to later be contradicted or at least tweaked as new tech and data come out. NIH and others now have big pushes for personalized medicine, like NCIs Precision Medicine Initiative, because it’s pretty obvious that a great medicine or piece of advice for one person is useless or even harmful to another. The amount of health data we’ve collected in all of human history will be dwarfed by the amount of data we will collect in 2028. Instead of looking back on data and making static conclusions, what if we wrote the code that adjusts the conclusions as more and more data come in. So the research findings will be “updated” continuously, like modern software, as opposed to shipping once in the form of a paper.

A bit misleading out of context but it is bio from a market standpoint in that it rises and falls with it. Just like how working with refinery sensors is oil industry even if you are thousands of miles away from a refinery or drilling platform.

I don't know from what I can tell we are heavily blurring the distinctions, smearing Bio into healthcare (including health IT)

I partly work on this project [0] which is not playing by the rules.

Case in point. If you are in Bio or Health or CS or web development have chops and expect large government grant applications to be boring please attempt to get through this (expired) one [1] it was a cool million for a number of different groups.

[0] https://ncats.nih.gov/translator

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-TR-17-0...

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