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Just 17 months after emerging from stealth, two-time entrepreneur and former Y Combinator partner Surbhi Sarna has raised $95 million for Collate, which developed AI tools to automate life sciences paperwork, at a valuation approaching $1 billion. Redpoint Ventures led the deal, which brings Collate’s total funding to $125 million.

“Life sciences strategy and documentation is going to be the AI battleground of 2026, the same way it was for legal in 2025,” Sarna tells Forbes. That’s been a booming opportunity, and legal AI startup Harvey is now worth $11 billion.

As the technology upends paperwork of all kinds, life sciences companies–which are drowning in documents for regulatory filings, clinical trials and product development–are a ripe target. Collate’s timing was auspicious: Not so early that the AI models weren’t good enough, but late enough that a number of life sciences firms had already tried building AI capabilities and realized they’d be better off outsourcing, she says.

Since signing its first customer in May 2025, the San Francisco-based startup has signed on some 50 more, including big pharmaceutical companies, major medical device manufacturers and publicly traded biotech firms. “We started working with some of the largest life sciences companies the same year we launched,” Sarna says. “Everyone is completely keyed into the problem.”

Redpoint’s Satish Dharmaraj, who led the investment, says that he believes life sciences documentation could be an even larger opportunity than legal. “In the life sciences world, there are these big, big enterprise companies,” Dharmaraj says. “You will get a big pharma company and grow like a weed inside.”

Sarna, who is 40 and an alum of the 2014 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, started her first business because of her own health issues: ovarian cysts so painful they made her faint, and doctors who couldn’t tell her if they were cancerous. She struggled to raise funds for that ovarian cancer detection startup, called NVision Medical, in its early days, then sold it to Boston Scientific for $275 million in 2018.

With Collate, which Forbes profiled last year as it emerged from stealth, it was a different story. Having a successful exit and a stint as a YC partner, she and her cofounder Nate Smith, another former YC visiting partner who had cofounded recruiting platform Lever, raised $30 million in seed funding from top investors, including Redpoint, First Round and Conviction Partners. The startup’s valuation at the time: more than $100 million—despite being so early that it didn’t yet have a commercial product or customers. Forbes subsequently featured the........

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