Biobot Analytics

For decades, the way the world tracks disease has rested on a simple data source: people who show up. Hospital admissions. Lab-confirmed cases. ED visits. Each is a real signal, and each has powered the modern public health system. But every one of them shares the same blind spot — the data only exists once someone gets sick enough, or insured enough, or close enough to a clinic, to enter the system.

By the time a disease shows up in the clinic, it's already in the water.

Every human body sheds something every day — viruses, bacteria, antibiotic resistance genes, drug metabolites, chemical exposures, lifestyle biomarkers. All of it flows through the same place: the sewer. Whether someone has health insurance or not, whether they ever see a doctor or not, whether they know they're sick yet or not — everyone has a voice in the sewer. The infrastructure to read that signal has existed under every American city for seventy years. The technology to do it accurately, at scale, and in real time has only existed for the last few.

The Opportunity: Population-Level Health Intelligence

Clinical data is precise but partial. Survey data is comprehensive but slow and self-reported. Wastewater data sits in a category of its own — predictive, inclusive, and versatile. It's a leading indicator for outbreaks because viral shedding precedes symptoms. It's inclusive because everyone is in the sample, not just the people with access to clinical care. And it's versatile in a way that no other public health data source is — the same sample contains signals for infectious disease, drug epidemics, antimicrobial resistance, environmental contaminants, and metabolic markers, all at once.

The hard part has never been the science. It's been the operating layer: a sentinel network of treatment plants with the right permissions, a single standardized laboratory, the AI to interpolate from a few hundred sample sites to a country-scale signal, and a commercial buyer who will pay for the answer.

The data the world needed to fight the last pandemic has been flowing through every American city for decades. Someone had to build the layer that finally reads it.

A Wastewater Intelligence Platform

Biobot's platform does three critical things:

1. Operates the largest commercial wastewater sentinel network in the U.S. Roughly 110 strategically selected treatment plants enrolled, 90+ samples flowing into a single Biobot-operated lab every week. Standardized methods, comparable data across sites and over time, no federated noise. The Network covers respiratory viruses, high-risk substances, H5 influenza, antibiotic resistance, and more — and it can deploy a new pathogen assay nationwide in days because Biobot already holds the rights and the protocols.
2. Runs an AI interpolation model that extends the Network to every U.S. county. Roughly 100 strategic sample points feed proprietary geo-interpolation models that produce county-level estimates for 100% of U.S. counties, validated against hospital admissions data. Analytics layers on top — like Biobot's COVID-19 Risk Tiers — turn raw measurements into decision-ready signal for non-technical buyers.
3. Licenses the resulting data to the buyers who can act on it. The DAAS (Data-as-a-Service) platform serves pharma R&D (variant tracking, disease burden, target identification), clinical trials teams (faster and more equitable enrollment in communities where disease is actually spreading), medical affairs (situational awareness for field teams), and marketing (turning community-level disease intensity into targeted media spend).

This isn't a roadmap. The DAAS business launched in Q1 2024, grew from one pilot to $1.4M+ ARR inside twelve months, and now serves a customer roster that reads like a list of the largest names in pharma. Pfizer has expanded across three teams — Paxlovid marketing, influenza clinical trials, and COVID clinical trials — to $625K+ in committed bookings with renewal options through 2027. Sanofi runs Havas-mediated RSV and hMPV campaigns on Biobot data. Shionogi, Seqirus, and Invivyd are signed customers. Merck, Roche, GSK, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Gilead, CSL Seqirus, CVS, Rite Aid, the Department of Defense, HHS, and Citadel sit in proposal, contracting, or integration stages.

Why We Invested

Three things had to be true at the same time for wastewater intelligence to become a real category, and they finally are:

• The data is uniquely defensible. A standardized single-lab Network beats a federation of 70+ labs reporting incomparable measurements at state-level resolution. Biobot's coverage, cadence, and AI interpolation give it a data product the freely available CDC NWSS dataset cannot match — and that pharma buyers have repeatedly chosen to pay for over the free alternative.
• The commercial pivot is working. When the CDC's testing contract went to an ultra-low-cost bidder in 2023, it confirmed the company's hypothesis that commodity testing wasn't the long-term business — the data, the network, and the AI were. The DAAS pivot has gone from beta pilot to $3M engaged pipeline in eighteen months, with healthcare advertising emerging as the use case with the most pull. The 2025 plan reaches break-even on $3M in DAAS bookings — and the customer mix that gets them there is already on paper.
• The platform extends far beyond respiratory viruses. The same network, same lab, same AI runs across antibiotic resistance, fentanyl and the opioid epidemic, PFAS and environmental contaminants, GLP-1 and prescription drug consumption, and pan-pathogen virome sequencing. The beachhead is $170M; the next-product expansion is $510M; the international license model takes it past $1B.

Mariana Matus, PhD (CEO) and Newsha Ghaeli (President) met at MIT and founded Biobot in 2017 on a single thesis: the wastewater infrastructure under every American city was already a public health observatory; it just needed someone to read it. Mariana wrote her MIT PhD dissertation on wastewater epidemiology before there was a wastewater epidemiology industry. Newsha came from MIT's smart-city research program and brought the operating instinct to scale physical infrastructure across U.S. metros. Both were named to TIME100 Next. They built the opioid use case with municipal customers in the early years, became the first company to commercialize COVID wastewater testing in 2020, navigated the post-pandemic testing collapse without losing the asset that mattered, and have turned the moat they accidentally built — the network, the lab, the AI, the trust of every treatment plant operator in the country — into a category-defining data platform.

The next pandemic will be in the water before it's in the headlines. Biobot is the company reading it.