Daphne Koller

Current Company

insitro — Founder & CEO

From Online Education to AI Drug Discovery

Daphne Koller's first startup changed education. As a Stanford computer science professor, she co-founded Coursera with Andrew Ng in 2012, building a platform that brought university-level courses to tens of millions of learners worldwide. Coursera proved that world-class education could scale beyond the walls of elite institutions, and the company went public in 2021.

But Koller's deepest expertise — probabilistic graphical models and machine learning applied to biology — led her to a bigger problem. In 2018, she founded insitro with the thesis that drug discovery was broken: too slow, too expensive, too reliant on gut instinct. She believed machine learning, combined with massive biological datasets generated by high-throughput lab automation, could fundamentally change how drugs are designed.

Rewriting the Rules of Drug Discovery

insitro uses machine learning to analyze vast biological datasets — patient genetics, cellular responses, disease progression — to identify drug targets and predict which molecules will work before expensive clinical trials begin. The company builds its own datasets using automated laboratories that can run millions of experiments, generating the kind of structured biological data that machine learning models need to make useful predictions.

Koller's dual legacy — democratizing education through Coursera and applying AI to medicine through insitro — reflects a consistent belief that technology can solve problems that human institutions have failed to address at scale. A MacArthur Fellow and member of the National Academy of Sciences, she is among the most credentialed founders in biotech, bringing rare depth in both the computational and biological sides of drug discovery.