Top Life Sciences Startups in 2026

Edwards Lifesciences is the global leader in the science of heart valves and hemodynamic monitoring. Driven by a passion to help patients, the company partners with clinicians to develop innovative technologies in the areas of structural heart disease and critical care monitoring that enable them to save and enhance lives.

23andMe is a human genome research company enabling users to study their ancestry, genealogy, and inherited traits. A startup co-founded by Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 23andMe has plans to make the human genome searchable. Brin, along with Google, gave 23andMe $3.9 million as part of a series A in May of 2007. The company was named after the number of chromosome pairs in humans. They aim to help people understand what their genes mean by indexing them and highlighting significant findings. 23andMe allows its clients/users to study their ancestry, genealogy and inherited traits. The company also markets to researchers and scientists, for whom they provide neatly categorized and easily searchable data. One reason the Google investment in 23andMe made sense was that this company could enable the search giant to index another facet of the world's information. With the Biotech and Health Care industries growing rapidly, 23andMe could help Google get and maintain a market hold in these already multi-billion dollar areas.

Exo is a medical device startup handheld ultrasound platform and AI for imaging and therapeutic applications. The company is committed to delivering affordable and easy-to-use medical imaging to healthcare professionals around the world. By delivering easy-to-use, high-quality medical imaging. Exo empowers healthcare professionals to make critical, real-time decisions that improve patient outcomes. The Exo ultrasound platform combines advances in nano-materials, novel sensor technologies, advanced signal processing, and computation with the economies of scale of semiconductor manufacturing to dramatically reduce the cost of imaging. It also represents a giant leap in imaging and therapeutics technology one that will drive the development of high-performance products that are accessible, easy-to-use, and available at a price point never before possible.

Bio-Rad Laboratories has played a leading role in the advancement of scientific discovery for over 50 years by providing a broad range of innovative tools and services to the life science research and clinical diagnostics markets. Founded in 1952, Bio-Rad has a global team of more than 6,500 employees and serves more than 85,000 research and industry customers worldwide through its global network of operations. Throughout its existence, Bio-Rad has built strong customer relationships that advance scientific research and development efforts and support the introduction of new technology used in the growing fields of genomics, proteomics, drug discovery, food safety, medical diagnostics, and more.

Scriptly is a modern, cloud-based pharmacy management platform that streamlines operations, automates manual work, and reduces burnout, so pharmacy teams can focus on what really matters: patient care. What sets us apart: we were built by people who’ve been in your shoes. Our team includes pharmacists, techs, and other healthcare professionals who understand the real problems and decided to do something about them.

BioLM is building the API layer for biological language models - making it easy to program DNA and proteins like software. We provide inference, tokenization, and fine-tuning APIs purpose-built for biological sequences, enabling researchers and developers to generate, analyze, and optimize DNA and amino acid sequences at scale. On top of our APIs, we’re building scientific interfaces that make these models usable in real workflows - from sequence design to iterative experimentation. Our goal is to make modern AI-native biology accessible to anyone building in biotech.