Every year, thousands of AI startups launch with bold claims. Most fade. The CB Insights AI 100 list is where you find the ones that don’t.
CB Insights picks 100 winners from 40,000+ companies, looking at deal activity, investor strength, hiring momentum, and real commercial traction.
For a health or life sciences startup, making to this list means you’ve crossed the gap between a promising demo and a product that actually works in clinical settings.
And the numbers back it up. 64% of AI 100 winners closed a follow-on round versus 31% for comparable companies and 198 days faster.
This year, healthcare and life sciences tied with financial services as the largest industry subcategory. Just 9 companies out of 100, competing for spots alongside robotics, cybersecurity, and enterprise software.
Data moat: THE THING that these winners are leveraging
Before we get into each company, there’s one pattern worth understanding. When we looked across this year’s winners, the companies with the most durable businesses share one common thread: their data is the moat.
Where the underlying data is non-textual such as molecular structures, general-purpose AI cannot natively represent it. Where AI can already read the data, the moat shifts to switching costs. And where the data is hard to access (like regulated patient records or licensed databases) the dataset itself becomes the moat.
And that explains exactly why these nine startups made the cut.
The 9 healthcare and life sciences startups on the CB Insights AI 100 list (2026)
1. Assort Health
Founders: Jeff Liu and Jon Wang
Year: 2023 | Location: San Francisco, USA
Assort Health builds specialty-specific AI voice agents for healthcare. Its platform automates scheduling, call routing, and patient intake, cutting hold times and freeing clinical staff for higher-value work. The company has handled over 100 million patient interactions across thousands of providers, with a 98% resolution rate.
2. Boltz
Founders: Gabriele Corso, Jeremy Wohlwend, and Saro Passaro
Year: 2024 (launched publicly January 2026) | Location: Boston, USA
Boltz spun out of MIT CSAIL to build open-source AI models for drug discovery. Its Boltz series, including Boltz-2 for binding affinity prediction, is now used by 100,000+ scientists across top pharma companies and biotechs. The company launched with a $28M seed round and a collaboration with Pfizer.
3. Chai Discovery
Founders: Joshua Meier, Jack Dent, Matthew McPartlon, and Jacques Boitreaud
Year: 2024 | Location: San Francisco, USA
Chai Discovery builds frontier AI to predict and reprogram biochemical interactions. Its model, Chai-2, designs antibodies entirely from scratch with a near-20% hit rate. The company grew from a $150M to a $1.3B valuation in 15 months and recently partnered with Eli Lilly.
4. Elicit
Founders: Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun
Year: 2021 (as part of non-profit Ought; spun out as an independent PBC in 2023)
Location: Oakland, California, USA
Elicit uses language models to automate scientific research workflows. Researchers use the platform to find relevant papers, extract data, and run systematic reviews, without keyword matching or hallucinated citations. Over 2 million researchers globally use Elicit today.
5. Ellipsis Health
Founders: Mainul Mondal, Michael Aratow, and Susan Solinsky
Year: 2017 | Location: San Francisco, USA
Ellipsis Health built Sage, an emotionally intelligent AI Care Manager to automate patient engagement and care management workflows. Powered by the company’s proprietary “Empathy Engine” and trained on millions of real clinical conversations, Sage conducts autonomous care management calls for enrollment, assessments, follow-ups, care coordination, and patient support.
6. Layer Health
Founders: David Sontag, Monica Agrawal, Luke Murray, Steven Horng, and Divya Gopinath
Year: 2023 | Location: Massachusetts, USA
Layer Health solves the information problem in healthcare. Every interaction generates a trail of breadcrumbs, including clinical notes, lab results, and patient messages. However, this data is unstructured and hard to understand. Layer Health’s first product, Distill, uses AI to quickly perform any clinical, administrative, or research task that requires reading and understanding medical charts.
7. Penguin Ai
Founders: Fawad Butt (CEO)
Year: 2024 | Location: Palo Alto, California, USA
Penguin Ai is built to tackle the $1 trillion administrative burden in US healthcare. Its agents handle prior authorisations, medical coding, claims adjudication, and appeals management, reducing a 25-minute manual task to under two minutes. The company has raised $29.7M in venture funding.
8. Periodic Labs
Founders: Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk
Year: 2025 | Location: San Francisco, USA
Periodic Labs aims to fuse LLMs, robotics, and physics simulations to accelerate material discovery and experimental science. Stitched together, a simulation could theoretically discover new compounds, a robot could mix the materials, and an LLM could analyse the results and suggest course corrections. This means compressed R&D cycles, automated hypothesis testing, and new drug candidates discovered in months rather than decades.
9. Qualified Health
Founders: Justin Norden (CEO), Shantanu Phatakwala, Beau Norgeot, and Nirav R. Shah
Year: 2023 | Location: Palo Alto, California, USA
Qualified Health launched with $30 million in seed funding to develop the infrastructure for generative AI in healthcare. The technology solution provides healthcare organisations with comprehensive infrastructure to implement and scale generative AI solutions safely.
What these 9 companies tell you about the future of health AI
Taken together, these startups reveal three things.
First, data is the real competitive advantage. The companies winning in health AI are those sitting on data that nobody else can access. Second, the administrative burden is finally being tackled at scale. Third, drug discovery is undergoing a genuine transformation.
The CB Insights AI 100 has an impressive track record of spotting companies before they become household names. In health AI, these nine are worth watching closely.
-By Rinkle Dudhani and the AHT Team
