Innovation Month: Hybrid Event – From PhD to Founder: Building (and Selling) a Startup

From lab bench to boardroom: what does it actually take to build (and sell) a biotech company? Join us for a fireside chat with Kristina Fontanez, PhD — a two-time founder who scaled her last startup, Fluent BioSciences, from 2 to 40+ employees, raised $19M+, and led it to an $85M acquisition by Illumina. Now she’s building Adept Scientific, an AI platform tackling a problem she saw firsthand: life science labs have no real-time visibility into how their products actually perform.

The conversation will be moderated by Idicula Mathew, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Derby Entrepreneurship Center and Cofounder & CEO of Hera Health Solutions, a biotechnology company specializing in the research, development, and commercialization of a proprietary nanotechnology-enabled platform for transforming existing therapeutics into more effective and long-acting therapies.

Whether you’re curious about science, startups, or the leap between academia and industry, come hear how Kristina turned a research gap into a growing company — and bring your questions.

Pizza served at 5:30pm, talk starts at 6:00pm.

About Kristina Fontanez

Adept Scientific is led by founder and CEO Kristina Fontanez, PhD (Princeton AB, Harvard PhD, MIT postdoc). Kristina co-founded Fluent BioSciences, scaling the team from 2 to 40+ employees, launching 7 commercial products, and raising $19M+ in funding. She played a pivotal leadership role in securing the company’s $85M acquisition by Illumina in 2024. Throughout her tenure at Fluent and later as Senior Director at Illumina, Kristina identified a systemic gap: life science companies lacked real-time visibility into product performance in customer labs. Support was anecdotal, field engineers didn’t scale, and product teams flew blind. This firsthand operator experience, spanning R&D, commercialization, manufacturer economics, and post-acquisition integration is exactly why she’s building Adept: an AI-powered platform designed to provide the “Google Maps” for lab workflows, finally closing the visibility gap in life sciences.

This Innovation Month event is jointly hosted by Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research and Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts.

Learn more about the Auster Center: austercenter.tufts.edu
Learn more about the Derby Entrepreneurship Center: derbyecenter.tufts.edu.