Can Silicon Valley stop the next COVID?

Mariana Matus was working on a Ph.D. in sewage. A grad student at MIT, she was sifting through wastewater — from a building, a neighborhood, a city — for bits of viruses. The data could then be used to analyze the health of everyone who'd flushed. Pretty relevant information in 2020, right?

Matus thought so, too. Even before she had her degree, she went hunting for investors to turn the idea into a company. The pitch was that her team could help fight the COVID-19 pandemic by using wastewater surveillance, giving public health officials, or even you and me, a bottoms-down heads-up on whether people were sick.

The venture capitalists she approached were perplexed. Why was a student in public health — an academic, service-oriented discipline that strives to help people as a social good — asking Silicon Valley for money? "One of the key questions from investors was if we meant to create a nonprofit," Matus says. "They'd say: 'Are you sure? Did you mean to create a C-corp and a high-growth startup?' They didn't understand that there's this space of public health, that there are people whose job is to look at data and use it to create a program or intervention."

But that's exactly what Matus was pitching: a venture-backed startup explicitly aimed at responding to the next pandemic — and, in the process, delivering an impressive return on investment. "We are population health monitoring as a service," she says. "It's ongoing. There's a recurring, sustainable aspect to the revenue." In October 2021, Matus and her partner got $20 million in Series A funding to launch Biobot; today the company has 130 employees, a $125 million valuation, and a contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Broadly speaking, the US response to COVID-19 sucked — not the thankless, unceasing labor of first responders and healthcare workers, but the chaotic and often contradictory efforts of the nation's public-health machine. Even after decades of warning and preparation, over a million Americans died, businesses failed, and schools shut down. Everybody felt the hit in one way or another. If the past three years represent the best the government can do, then pandemic response is precisely the kind of activity that venture capitalists like to describe as "ripe for disruption."