Zeroshot Biolabs

Zeroshot Biolabs is a Canadian techbio startup building AI learning pipelines that translate zebrafish drug exposure data into human pre-clinical insights. The company creates biological foundation models for drug discovery, with an early focus on whole-organism data from zebrafish — an increasingly popular vertebrate animal model offering ideal unit economics for AI-scale training and rapid turnaround. Using high-throughput single-cell RNA sequencing combined with proprietary AI models, Zeroshot generates optimized compound rankings to accelerate hit-to-lead decisions for therapeutics customers. Founded in January 2025 by CEO Steven ten Holder, who is also an investigator at Creative Destruction Lab, the company is pioneering gene expression foundation models that can translate zebrafish drug-exposure screens into actionable insights for pharmaceutical developers without having been explicitly trained on those specific contexts — the 'zero-shot' capability the company is named for.