Balakrishnan: Nick worked on his answers to my questions and they got better and better. I was working at Policygenius, a post–Series D insurtech startup. My experience is very different; I was setting a business unit strategy, running sales and success teams. But I was also helping Nick out. I wrote his Techstars application.
Lilovich: To be fair, it’s not like she did it completely without me! [Laughs.] But yes, Sruti was involved the whole time. We founded the company in August 2020, and put together the beginnings of a team including my cofounders, Branton DeMoss and Rafael Jardim. That’s when I asked Sruti whether instead of working for another startup, she could work for this startup. We got into the Techstars Chicago accelerator, and went through it together.
Balakrishnan: When Nick got into Techstars Chicago, I said, “You’ve been working on this a long time. Let’s double down. If both of us are working on it, this needs to succeed or fail quickly.” Our motto was “Build faster.” Neither of us paid ourselves. We lived on savings. We went through Techstars in 2021, which helped us realize the initial business model didn’t make sense, and that biopharma was the right market.
Lilovich: Sruti figured out our market was biopharma, where drug discovery now takes 10 years and $2 billion to get a single drug—it’s incredible how expensive and slow that process is. Any edge on that problem will be an enormous value for patients, especially those with rare diseases. We were just talking to a professor who works in ALS, and as we walked through a demo of our platform, he said, “Wow. The last literature review I did involved 16,000 papers; using your tool I could shave that down by 100x.”