When Surbhi Sarna first tried to build a company, she had little more than determination and a personal story that made her vision urgent. At 13, she suffered from ovarian cysts so painful they made her faint, but doctors couldn’t tell her whether they were cancerous. Years later, she founded nVision Medical to change that, creating the first device cleared by the FDA to collect cells from fallopian tubes, offering women the possibility of earlier ovarian cancer diagnoses. She struggled for every dollar of funding, raising just $17 million before selling nVision to Boston Scientific for $275 million in 2018.
This week, Sarna returned to the founder’s seat with a very different kind of launch. Her new startup, Collate, debuted at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference with $30 million in seed funding, an eye-popping sum that values the company at more than $100 million before it has even signed a customer. Redpoint Ventures led the round, with participation from First Round, Conviction Partners, and Y Combinator, where Sarna had spent the past few years as a partner. She has now left YC to focus full-time on Collate.
Collate’s mission is decidedly less dramatic than cancer diagnostics, but potentially just as transformative. Sarna wants to automate one of the most tedious and expensive burdens in the life sciences: paperwork. Every drug or medical device company is weighed down by documentation for research, trials, manufacturing, labeling, and more. Sarna believes large language models can take on much of that load, accelerating development of drugs and devices that might otherwise take years to reach patients. “If I talk to customers, they say they would use this immediately,” she told Forbes.
The startup has yet to release a product, but Sarna expects to sign a handful of major pharmaceutical or device companies in the coming months. The sales process will be slow-moving but high-value, Redpoint’s Satish Dharmaraj said, and sticky enough that once Collate is inside a business, it will spread across departments.
Sarna co-founded the company with Nate Smith, a fellow YC alum who previously built recruiting platform Lever. Their partnership, she said, grew out of an organic conversation at her house, encouraged—half-seriously—by her eight-year-old son.
For Sarna, now 39, the second time feels different. She’s no longer scraping together $250,000 at a time or fighting to be taken seriously by skeptical investors. With Collate, she’s stepping into the AI wave with momentum, funding, and the clarity of someone who has already beaten the odds once.
