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.

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.