Pharma/Biotech Founders & Investors Mixer
The Story
Some evenings leave you feeling a little more hopeful about the world. Our Pharma/Biotech Founders & Investors Mixer, held on Tuesday, August 11, 2026 was one of them.
The event sold out, and the room was full, but what stays with us most is not the number of people who came. It is the conversations. Afterward, guests told us how closely the panel reflected their own experiences in biotech over the past several years. Others said they had learned something new.
It was a reminder that beneath all the technologies, companies, investments, and scientific ambitions, this industry is made up of people trying to figure things out together.
In a world where so much of our interaction happens through screens, there is still something beautiful about gathering in a room with people who care deeply about science: people who are building, investing, questioning, learning, and still believing that medicine can become better. For a few hours, all of those individual journeys crossed paths.
Key Takeaways
1. Some of AI's biggest opportunities in biotech may come after drug discovery.
Enormous amounts of time and capital are consumed in clinical development, documentation, data management, compliance, and execution. AI may be just as valuable in helping promising science make the long journey toward becoming medicine.
2. In pharma, AI has to earn our trust.
A convincing answer is not enough. In a regulated environment, traceability, data provenance, auditability, and compliance need to be built into AI systems from the beginning.
3. Sometimes AI's value appears in very ordinary, expensive work.
John Walters shared an example of a pharma R&D organization spending 55,000 labor hours on documentation. Sanai's beta-test auditors also reported an immediate 50% reduction in audit time through better searchability, traceability, and citation.
Progress does not always have to look dramatic. Sometimes it simply means giving thousands of hours back to people so they can spend more of their lives doing work that actually needs their minds.
Meet the Voices & Collaborators
Our Speakers:
John Walters
Rich Ramko
Yangchen Bhutia Sharma
Dr. Prasun Mishra
Angela Jimenez MD MP
Our Co-Hosting Collaborators:
Sanai
Founders Bay
Our Co-Organizer:
Serena Yuz