Surbhi Sarna's Collate raises $95 million to automate life sciences paperwork

Why it matters

Collate's round shows investors are hunting for the next vertical AI category after legal. In life sciences, the upside is huge, but so is the burden of proving AI can speed paperwork without weakening regulatory controls.

Surbhi Sarna and Nate Smith's Collate has raised $95 million to automate life sciences documentation, at a valuation "approaching $1 billion," Forbes reported.

Redpoint Ventures led the financing, which Forbes said brings Collate's total funding to $125 million. The exact valuation was not disclosed. The round comes 17 months after San Francisco-based Collate emerged from stealth and a little more than a year after Collate signed its first customer in May 2025, according to Forbes.

Sarna, 40, is not a first-time founder learning regulated healthcare from the outside. Forbes says she previously built NVision Medical, an ovarian cancer detection company inspired by her own health issues, and sold it to Boston Scientific for $275 million in 2018. She later became a Y Combinator partner. Smith, her Collate cofounder, is also a former YC visiting partner and previously cofounded the recruiting platform Lever.

The bet: legal AI, but for regulated drug and device work

Collate is trying to move the AI software land grab into one of the least forgiving corners of enterprise paperwork: life sciences strategy and documentation. Forbes describes Collate's tools as focused on regulatory filings, clinical trials and product development documents, the kinds of workflows where a single submission can run to 10,000 pages.

"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 comparison is not accidental. Forbes points to legal AI vendor Harvey, which it says is now worth $11 billion, as the recent template for a vertical AI business that starts with high-value professional paperwork. The risk for Collate is that life sciences is even more compliance-sensitive than legal work, with hallucinations carrying patient-safety and regulatory consequences rather than just productivity costs.

Sarna's answer, according to Forbes, is to keep humans in the loop. She told Forbes that Collate requires human verification before documents are exported from its system. She also said Collate's accuracy is above 90% and often closer to 97%, while acknowledging that AI errors and hallucinations remain an issue. Those accuracy and time-savings figures are Collate's claims, not independently audited metrics in the Forbes article.

What Redpoint is underwriting

Collate's new round is less about a general AI assistant and more about whether Sarna can turn life sciences documentation into an expanding enterprise wedge. Forbes says Collate has signed "some 50" customers after its first customer in May 2025, including big pharmaceutical companies, major medical device makers and publicly traded biotech firms. The customers were not named.

Redpoint's Satish Dharmaraj, who led the investment, told Forbes that life sciences documentation could be larger than legal because of the size of enterprise buyers in the sector. "You will get a big pharma company and grow like a weed inside," he said.

That is the play investors are funding: land inside a regulated organization through a painful document workflow, then expand across adjacent paperwork tied to trials, regulatory submissions and product development. Sarna told Forbes that some life sciences firms had already tried building AI internally and concluded they were better off outsourcing, a sign that Collate is arriving after the first wave of in-house experimentation rather than before it.

A different fundraising path than NVision

The financing also marks a sharp contrast with Sarna's first company. Forbes says she struggled to raise money for NVision Medical in its early days. With Collate, the founder history changed the starting line: Forbes reported last year that Collate raised a $30 million seed round from investors including Redpoint, First Round and Conviction Partners at a valuation of more than $100 million, even before Collate had a commercial product or customers.

The new $95 million round suggests investors believe Sarna and Smith have found early market pull. The harder test is whether Collate can turn self-reported speed and accuracy gains into durable procurement wins inside pharma, medical device and biotech companies that already have entrenched regulatory and document systems.

Sarna framed the restraint as part of the product rather than a limitation. "That might not sound sexy, but it's important," she told Forbes, referring to human verification. "I wanted to introduce AI and documentation to the industry in a way that I thought was patient safe."