Novaflow launches for life‑science labs

Biology labs often generate more sequencing data than they can analyze, and Novaflow says its new software can turn those files into figures and summaries in minutes. (ycombinator.com) Novaflow is a San Francisco startup in Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch. Y Combinator lists Aman Agarwal, a former computational biologist, as chief executive and Amulya Balakrishnan, a former Zoom engineer, as chief technology officer. (ycombinator.com) The company says researchers can upload raw files such as comma-separated value files, FASTQ sequencing files, and BAM alignment files, ask questions in plain English, and get publication-ready plots back. It also says the system exports Jupyter notebooks and reproducible Python code so labs can rerun or audit the analysis. (ycombinator.com) That pitch targets a specific lab bottleneck: bioinformatics, the step where scientists turn raw sequencing output into usable results. Novaflow says small labs routinely spend more than $100,000 a year per analyst and that many groups run roughly five experimental scientists for every analyst, leaving researchers waiting weeks or months for answers. (ycombinator.com) On its site, Novaflow says it captures the experiment description in natural language, selects a workflow such as ribonucleic acid sequencing or assay for transposase-accessible chromatin sequencing, runs peer-reviewed methods, and returns interactive plots and traceable results. The company says the outputs are meant for lab meetings, grant reports, or paper submission. (novaflowapp.com) The product is aimed at academic labs, biotech teams, and clinical or diagnostic groups handling high-throughput assays, according to its Y Combinator launch page. That places Novaflow in the growing market for software that tries to replace custom scripts and outsourced analysis with automated pipelines. (ycombinator.com) Novaflow says researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, Mount Sinai, the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard, and Caltech are already using the product in their labs. On its own site, the company includes a testimonial from a Mount Sinai researcher saying analysis time fell from three weeks to under 30 minutes. (ycombinator.com, novaflowapp.com) The company’s launch materials frame the software less as a writing tool than as a lab analyst that chooses methods, spins up compute, and hands back code, plots, and summaries. For labs struggling to hire bioinformatics staff, Novaflow is selling speed, lower labor costs, and a shorter path from experiment to paper figure. (ycombinator.com, novaflowapp.com)