Seventeen months. No commercial product to start. $125 million in total funding. A valuation approaching $1 billion.
If you haven’t heard of Collate yet — you’re about to.
The Funding: $95 Million Series C at Near-$1 Billion Valuation
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.
The funding round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with additional investors including First Round and Conviction Partners. The company plans to utilise the new capital to scale its operations and meet the surging demand from pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and biotech firms seeking to outsource their regulatory documentation processes to AI-driven systems.
The funding brings total capital raised to $125 million since the San Francisco-based company emerged from stealth 17 months ago.
Who Is Surbhi Sarna — The Founder Who Has Done This Before
Surbhi Sarna is not a first-time founder building on hope. She is a two-time entrepreneur who has already navigated the entire journey — from a personal insight to a regulatory-cleared product to a major acquisition.
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.
After the exit, she didn’t retire. She went deeper into the ecosystem.
After selling nVision and spending time at Y Combinator, Sarna identified a significant opportunity in automating life sciences documentation.
She served as General Partner at Y Combinator from 2020 to 2025, leading its healthcare practice — giving her an extraordinary vantage point on what problems were being solved across hundreds of healthcare startups, and crucially, what wasn’t being solved.
What wasn’t being solved? The paperwork.
The Co-Founding Team — Two Complementary Builders
Collate was founded in 2024 by Surbhi Sarna and Nate Smith.
Nate Smith brought complementary experience. Previously the founder of Lever — a talent-acquisition software company — as well as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator, he understood building software platforms with scale and mature product experience. At Collate he leads technology, product architecture and engineering execution.
The pairing is deliberate and powerful: a founder who deeply understands life sciences regulatory workflows, and a founder who deeply understands how to build scalable SaaS platforms. These aren’t skills that overlap — they’re skills that multiply each other.
What Problem Is Collate Actually Solving?
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, labelling, and more.
The scale of the problem is almost incomprehensible to anyone outside the industry.
Some regulatory submissions run to 10,000 pages.
Ten thousand pages. For a single submission. Compiled by humans. Taking months. And that’s just one submission in a process that involves hundreds of documents across the lifecycle of a single drug or device.
Collate supports medical device, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical companies with document generation, regulatory documentation, submissions and workflow. It leverages large language models, natural language processing and AI-automated drafting to reduce documentation time significantly.
By digitising compliance workflows, the technology can potentially increase the speed of product approvals by up to five times.
Five times faster to market. For a drug that could save thousands of lives. That’s not a productivity improvement — that’s a healthcare outcome.
How Collate Works — Speed + Safety
The performance numbers Collate is putting up are extraordinary.
Collate’s AI tools deliver time savings of 50% to 90% on documents that previously took months to complete, whilst maintaining accuracy above 90%.
But speed without safety is worthless — and potentially dangerous — in life sciences. Collate has built patient safety into the core of the product.
The company requires human verification before documents are exported to ensure patient safety.
This is the critical design choice that separates Collate from a generic AI writing tool. The AI does the heavy lifting — the human confirms before anything goes out. It’s automation with accountability baked in.
50 Customers in 13 Months — From Zero to Industry Adoption
Collate has signed roughly 50 customers since launching its first commercial product in May 2025, including large pharmaceutical companies, major medical device makers, and publicly traded biotech firms.
Fifty enterprise-grade customers — pharma giants, publicly traded biotechs, major device manufacturers — in 13 months from first product launch. In enterprise B2B sales, that pace of adoption is exceptional.
Many life sciences firms had already tried building in-house AI tools — only to realise they’d be better off outsourcing.
This is a critical insight. When large pharma companies try to build their own AI documentation tools internally and fail — then come to Collate — it validates both the difficulty of the problem and the quality of the solution.
As Redpoint’s Satish Dharmaraj, who led the investment, put it: “You will get a big pharma company and grow like a weed inside.”
That’s the enterprise SaaS expansion playbook at its finest — land a big customer, solve their problem brilliantly, and expand across their entire organisation.
The Harvey AI Comparison — And Why It Matters
Surbhi Sarna is making a very specific and very confident bet about where AI is going in 2026.
“Life sciences strategy and documentation is going to be the AI battleground of 2026, the same way it was for legal in 2025,” Sarna told Forbes. That’s been a booming opportunity, and legal AI startup Harvey is now worth $11 billion.
The parallel is precise. In 2025, Harvey AI captured the legal documentation market — replacing armies of associates who spent their days on discovery, contract review, and legal memo writing. Harvey is now worth $11 billion.
Collate’s thesis: the same transformation is about to happen in pharma and biotech — where regulatory documentation is equally complex, equally time-consuming, and equally ripe for AI disruption.
The difference? The stakes in life sciences aren’t just economic. Collate’s mission is to provide an accurate, patient-safe automation solution that reduces the time required for life sciences documentation by up to 90 percent.
Faster documentation = faster regulatory approvals = life-saving medicines reaching patients sooner. The mission is both commercial and deeply human.
Recognition — Forbes Noticed Before the $95 Million
Collate was recently recognised on the Forbes 2025 Next Billion Dollar Startups list, highlighting its current growth trajectory within the broader healthcare technology sector.
Making the Forbes next billion-dollar list before raising your Series C — and then raising at near-unicorn valuation — is about as good a validation sequence as any startup could ask for.
Collate Key Details
| Detail | Info |
| Company | Collate |
| Founded | 2024 |
| CEO & Co-Founder | Surbhi Sarna |
| CTO & Co-Founder | Nate Smith |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Round | Series C |
| Amount Raised | $95 Million |
| Lead Investor | Redpoint Ventures |
| Other Investors | First Round, Conviction Partners |
| Total Funding | $125 Million |
| Valuation | Near $1 Billion |
| Commercial Launch | May 2025 |
| Customers | ~50 (pharma, biotech, medical devices) |
| Time Savings | 50–90% per document |
| Accuracy | Above 90% |
| Surbhi Sarna’s Previous Exit | nVision Medical → Boston Scientific ($275 Mn) |
| Forbes Recognition | Next Billion Dollar Startups 2025 |
