Collate – About Us
Our mission
Accelerate life-saving innovations by creating accurate documentation for the life sciences industry.
Catalyze progress
Automate paperwork at every stage of development and commercialization.
Eliminate busy work
Enable teams to dedicate more time to their core responsibilities.
Deliver excellence
Provide cutting-edge AI solutions securely and reliably.
Who we are
Leadership team
Surbhi Sarna
CEO and Founder
Former CEO and Founder of nVision Medical (acquired by Boston Scientific for $275M), which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer. Board member at private and public life sciences companies. Former General Partner at Y Combinator, leading their healthcare practice. Author of Without a Doubt: How to Go from Underrated to Unbeatable.
Nate Smith
CTO and Founder
Former CEO, CTO, and Founder of Lever (acquired by Employ for $517M), a Talent Acquisition Suite with over 5000 customers, including Netflix, Atlassian, KPMG, and many leading startups. Former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and Product Manager at Google.
Jigish Patel
Chief Architect, Security Officer, and Founder
Experienced SaaS and cloud infrastructure architect. Previously owned compute platforms, realtime data infrastructure, and SSL services at Netflix, Airbnb, Symantec, and VeriSign. Creator of the Slate window manager.
The team
Founding technical team
Aparna Elangovan, PhD
Head of AI
Former Principal Deep Learning Engineer & Scientist at NVIDIA, where she led the launch of CUDA Copilot for accelerated computing. Previously a Senior NLP Applied Scientist at Amazon AGI and AWS AI Labs, leading LLM post-training for AWS HealthScribe and Alexa Health. PhD in NLP from the University of Melbourne, with publications on LLM evaluation and hallucination.
Sanchay Harneja
Head of Engineering
Former Head of Engineering at Hippocratic AI, where he led the team building LLM-powered healthcare agents and helped raise a $1.64B Series B. Previously a founding engineer at BetterOmics (acquired by Apple AIML Health), Director of Engineering at Apixio, and software engineer at Google. Holds 20+ patents. Degree in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur.
Benjamin Pastel
Founding Software Engineer
Former Staff ML Engineer at PicnicHealth, where he built segmentation transformers across 100M+ pages of medical documents and OCR extraction with half the error rate of Google and Amazon. Software engineer at Square, leading fraud detection features for 1M+ daily payments. MS in Computer Science with an AI specialization from Stanford, BA in Computer Science from Cornell.
Jordan Alperin
Founding Software Engineer
Software engineer at Facebook, where he rewrote the apps and games platform that drove ~35% of site ad revenue, and shipped Facebook Connect, including the Like button. Software engineer at AWS and Amazon Music. Co-founder/CTO of Rende. Holds 11 issued patents. Bachelor's and Master's in Computer Science from MIT.
Emmie He
Founding Software Engineer
Former Senior Software Engineer at ArsenalBio, where she owned scalable bioinformatics pipeline infrastructure spanning Slurm clusters, AWS Batch, and SageMaker HyperPod. MS in Computer Science from Brown and BS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Brandon Romero
Founding Software Engineer
Former Staff Software Engineer at Hippocratic AI, where he scaled the outbound dialing platform cut annual GPU spend ~22%. Previously technical lead at TikTok and software engineer at Amazon. Bachelor's degree in Engineering from Stanford.
Our Story
Previously, I ran a life sciences company—specifically, a company that was working on the early detection of ovarian cancer. I started the company because I was a patient myself. I was in a rush to get a better product to patients as quickly as I could. Our motto was “patients are waiting.” But every step I turned, there was a slog of paperwork to get through—from every phase of the company—R&D through clinical through marketing through sales.
I then went to YC, and had a front row seat to the best of software, and the amazing capabilities of AI. I decided that my industry deserved the best of the best, and that every function of every life sciences company should be freed from the monotonous work of filling out records so they can get back to what they love—working on life-saving products.
Surbhi Sarna
CEO and Founder
Join us
Join the Collate team
We're building an AI-native enterprise platform to transform the life sciences industry. If you're excited about applying cutting-edge AI to meaningful problems, we'd love to hear from you.
AI-first engineering
Build cutting-edge AI systems that power the future of healthcare
Modern stack
Work with the latest in AI/ML, Python, Go, TypeScript, and React
Meaningful impact
Help accelerate life-saving innovations reaching patients
Growth & ownership
Take ownership of core features and shape our technical direction