Daphne Koller

On World IP Day 2026, InspireIP recognizes Daphne Koller, founder and CEO of insitro, for building one of the most active patent programs at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biopharma.

The recognition is based on insitro’s patent activity. The company’s filings protect technologies behind its AI-enabled drug discovery platform, including cellular phenotyping, genotype-phenotype association, image-based gene function analysis, and computational chemistry.

Daphne’s path to drug discovery is unusual. She earned her PhD in computer science from Stanford University, later became a Stanford professor, and helped shape modern machine learning through her work in probabilistic models. She also co-founded Coursera, bringing advanced education to millions of learners.

With Insitro, she brought that same systems-level thinking into biology. The idea was not simply to apply AI to existing drug discovery. It was to build better biological datasets, connect them to machine learning, and use that system to find therapeutic targets with stronger human relevance.

That work now supports insitro’s programs across neuroscience, metabolism, oncology, and other areas where biology is complex, data-heavy, and difficult to model with traditional discovery methods alone.

In 2025, she was named to the inaugural Forbes 250: America’s Greatest Innovators list alongside Marc Andreessen, Jensen Huang, Reid Hoffman, Jennifer Doudna, and Fei-Fei Li.