The Top 5 Bio and Healthtech Startups in YC P26

Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch includes a strong crop of bio and healthtech companies, from new imaging hardware to programmable cancer drugs. Here are five that stood out.

Adialante — Cancer screening without barriers

Adialante (adialante.com) is building compact, mobile whole-body MRI systems designed to make cancer screening far more accessible. The company's thesis is that advances in algorithms and computing can enable a system with significantly less hardware, a fraction of the power consumption, and a major reduction in size while still matching the resolution of conventional machines. YC itself described the opportunity plainly: cancer kills because it's caught late, and Adialante aims to drop MRI costs to hundreds per scan and wait times to hours.

The company says it already has $12.75M in letters of intent and $30K in deposits. Co-founders Efraín Torres and Parker Jenkins met on the first floor of their engineering dorm and went on to develop their MRI technology out of research at the University of Minnesota.

FinalDose — A programmable drug that targets cancer at the DNA level

FinalDose (finaldose.ai) is developing what it calls a programmable drug platform. The team built a drug that reads DNA inside the cell, decides if it's diseased, and destroys the cell if it is. The idea is that swapping in a new guide sequence creates a new drug for a new disease, potentially collapsing the traditional R&D cycle.

FinalDose is starting with cancer, targeting previously "undruggable" drivers like MYC, TP53, and APC that existing drugs cannot reach. The company was founded by three Oxford PhDs: Jeff Liu (CEO, oncology), Li-Yao Huang (CSO, biochemistry), and Steven Lin (CTO, computational biology). FinalDose describes itself as the only deep-tech biotech startup in the YC P26 batch.

Voquill — AI reporting for pathologists

Voquill is building an AI coworker for pathologists. Voquill listens as pathologists work through cases, learns their reporting style, maximizes reimbursement codes, and produces a sign-out ready report in real time. Pathologists bill $30–40B each year but spend roughly a third of their time on reporting and lose another third of their contracted revenue to documentation gaps and billing errors — a significant drag on a field that's already short-staffed.

The founding team brings deep domain expertise. CEO Michael Gibson spent five years at Techcyte, a digital pathology company, where he rose to VP of Engineering and led the AI team building systems deployed at Mayo Clinic and other large reference labs. CTO Josiah Saunders also came from Techcyte, where he led the forward-deployed team developing an AI pathology platform for labs including Mayo Clinic, Quest, and Labcorp. In their first four weeks, they onboarded over 25 pathologists.

Clara — AI-powered primary care

Clara (askclara.com) is an AI primary care doctor that pulls a patient's full medical history, helps with diagnoses and treatment, and has licensed clinicians reviewing every medical decision. The AI handles the heavy lifting: pulling medical records from over 150,000 hospitals, reading labs against health goals, and drafting refills and orders, with a licensed clinician approving every clinical decision.

Clara was founded by the team that built Circle Medical to $100M in revenue: George Favvas served as CEO for a decade, Caitlin Swift was VP Clinical Operations as the practice scaled to nearly one million appointments per year, and Zeeshan built the clinical products there and also held product design roles at Meta and Uber. The company has raised a $12M pre-seed from YC and A.Capital.

Lumius — Real-time 3D ultrasound

Lumius (lumius-imaging.com) is building affordable, real-time 3D ultrasound devices. The company is working to advance beyond today's 2D ultrasound, which accounts for roughly 500 million scans annually. Ultrasound today is still mostly 2D, forcing clinicians to mentally reconstruct 3D anatomy from flat images, which makes procedures like vascular access hard to learn, with around 50% of attempts failing on the first try.

Existing 3D ultrasound systems cost roughly 10x more than standard 2D machines, limiting their use to cardiac and fetal imaging. Lumius is building a device that is affordable, compact, and portable, starting with vascular access and central line procedures, with plans to expand into blood clot detection, tumor diagnosis, and biopsy guidance. The founding team of Luca Menozzi, Chenhang Li, and colleagues bonded over ultrasound during their PhDs at Duke.