New Crop of Biotechs from Y Combinator

March 26, 2015 | This week marked Demo Day for budding companies incubated in Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, which began putting out feelers for biotech startups last year and is now moving with more confidence into the biomedical field. The freshman biotechs of Y Combinator included Reference Genomics, working on computational approaches to identifying pathogens and contaminants from DNA samples, and Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based synthetic biology company. This year's sophomore class has a greater spread of biology and health IT-related companies, among them Transcriptic, offering automated lab services in its robotics facility (with a discount for fellow Y Combinator startups). Tech Crunch names their favorite presentations from Demo Day, including several biotech entries.