Building terraFlow: How an Idea in the Lab Grew Into a Venture-Backed Startup
Dan Freeman, a Harvard PhD student in Biology and Biomedical Sciences, had worked with single-cell technology and pharma trials before and knew there had to be a better way. Fluent in technology development and fascinated with the power of artificial intelligence (AI), Dan started experimenting when he hit his aha moment. His vision for using AI to accelerate drug discovery had an early prototype and a powerful idea. Now what he needed was clarity about how to take this research and find the commercializing path—his customers, his pitch, and his business plan forward. That’s where the Startup Foundry came in.
terraFlow was born from a simple but ambitious premise: combine pharmaceutical companies’ internal data with the vast ocean of scientific literature to uncover biologically meaningful biomarkers. In drug development, these signals can mean the difference between a failed trial and a life-saving therapy. Freeman’s technology promised to speed up that process by mining millions of research papers and linking them to patient outcomes.
Learning to Speak the Language of Customers
During his time with the Startup Foundry, Dan was able to take advantage of working with industry, technology, and business experts. He learned to shift from talking about the brilliance of the algorithm to the problems it solved for scientists and executives inside big pharma. Through structured exercises in customer discovery, Dan began booking more conversations, asking better questions, and reshaping how he described terraFlow. “The question isn’t just what the AI can do,” he recalls, “but how it helps someone hit their clinical milestones faster.”
From Pitch to Pre-Seed Success
The storytelling work paid off. Armed with a sharper narrative and coaching from Foundry mentors, Freeman pitched investors and closed a $750,000 pre-seed round, including $600,000 from Boston-based Underscore VC. The funding provided 18 months of runway and set three clear milestones: launch terraFlow 2.0, close enterprise deals, and reach positive cash flow.
The company’s debut came at the international CYTO conference in Edinburgh, where Dan and his team unveiled terraFlow 2.0 to a hall filled with scientists and industry leaders. Soon after, the startup was piloting its AI with AstraZeneca, Vertex, Regeneron, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Eli Lilly. By the following quarter, terraFlow had doubled its active demos, deployed its platform inside AstraZeneca’s clinical trial datasets, and grown a sales pipeline worth more than $600,000.
Turning Science into Impact
Meanwhile, terraFlow strengthened its moat: mining 100,000 scientific papers (on the way to one million), filing two U.S. patents, and establishing itself as an industry player. Alongside the grind of customer calls and enterprise pilots, Dan found himself pitching on bigger stages—most memorably at Harvard Business School’s Shark Tank, where he went toe to toe with Kevin O’Leary, “Mr. Wonderful.”
The journey from idea to venture-backed company is rarely linear. For Dan, the Foundry mentors and experts offered a compass in the early fog: helping him listen to customers, tell a resonant story, and build investor confidence. Today, with institutional backing, industry pilots, and growing ARR, terraFlow is proving that the right combination of science, storytelling, and support can turn a bold idea into a company with the power to change how drugs are developed.
Dan explains, “The Startup Foundry helped me connect the dots. I had the science, but they showed me how to shape it into something customers wanted and investors could get behind—and I got to do it alongside a community of mentors and experts who really cared about helping me succeed.”
