Yue Dai is Co-Founder and CEO at Strand AI, a Y Combinator W26 biotech company building foundation models that predict missing biological data from measured readouts for life sciences teams. Strand AI generates multimodal patient data including gene expression, proteomics, and spatial transcriptomics from routinely collected samples.

Yue studied at McGill University and previously worked as a software engineer at Enable Medicine, Pathos, Microsoft Healthcare NExT (Artificial Intelligence & Research), and Amazon Web Services on RDS for SQL Server.

Yue co-founded Strand AI in 2025 with Oded Falik (CTO) to solve critical data gaps in clinical trials and biomarker discovery. The company is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch and is based in San Francisco.

Strand AI helps life sciences teams running clinical trials by generating missing multimodal patient data, enabling them to recover insights from incomplete cohorts without discarding valuable subjects. The platform allows researchers to predict proteomic or transcriptomic profiles from routinely collected data like pathology slides.

Strand AI addresses a major bottleneck in drug development where acquiring every data modality for every patient is expensive, invasive, and often impossible. The company's foundation models enable pharmaceutical and biotech companies to accelerate biomarker discovery and clinical trial outcomes by synthesizing missing data types.