1 in 11 babies born in America this year will be screened by a genetic test that didn’t exist a decade ago.
Biotech startup BillionToOne turned a simple but radical idea—detecting rare fragments of fetal DNA in a mother’s blood—into one of the most widely used prenatal tests in the U.S. And they’re not stopping there. The same approach could unlock something even bigger: early-stage cancer detection from a blood test, a breakthrough that could one day save millions of lives.
In this episode of Hard Tech, YC’s Jared Friedman sits down with David Tsao and Oguzhan Atay to hear how they went from half a lab bench to a $4B biotech company—and why they believe this is just the beginning of what their technology can do.
Learn more: https://www.billiontoone.com
Chapters:
00:00 – Finding One Mutation in Billions
01:00 – Detecting Disease From a Blood Sample
02:10 – From Lab Idea to $4B Company
03:05 – The Breakthrough That Made It Possible
05:15 – Building the First Test From Scratch
07:30 – One Customer and a Sales Crisis
08:55 – Inside the Lab: How It Actually Works
12:10 – Detecting Cancer From Blood
13:50 – The Path to Early Cancer Detection
16:05 – Why Early Cancer Detection Is So Hard
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
