Justin Byers
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Axio BioPharma
Justin Byers is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Axio BioPharma, an AI biomanufacturing company revolutionizing how monoclonal antibodies are developed and produced. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Axio launched in 2024 with a mission to accelerate and de-risk the development of recombinant proteins and monoclonal antibodies through AI-driven process design and U.S.-based manufacturing.
Under Justin’s leadership, Axio has pioneered a data-rich, machine learning–powered approach that reduces process development timelines from years to days unlocking faster, more cost-efficient pathways for biotech partners. He has steered the company’s rapid growth, from establishing its state-of-the-art facilities to securing strategic partnerships, including collaborations to advance next-generation drug delivery technologies.
With a background at the intersection of biomanufacturing, technology, and entrepreneurship, Justin brings a vision of scaling biologics development with speed, reliability, and accessibility. He is committed to building Axio into a trusted partner for innovators worldwide, combining scientific rigor with cutting-edge AI to bring life-changing therapies to patients faster.
Axio BioPharma
Website: https://www.axiobiopharma.com/
Axio BioPharma is an AI-driven biomanufacturing company revolutionizing how monoclonal antibodies are developed and produced. Headquartered in Madison, WI, Axio combines high-throughput production with proprietary machine learning to predict optimal scalable manufacturing processes in hours - not years. By accelerating development timelines and reducing costs, Axio enables biopharma innovators to bring life-saving therapies to market faster and more efficiently. With deep expertise in antibody manufacturing, protein purification, and bioinformatics, Axio supports a wide range of partners across research, diagnostics, and therapeutics with scalable, U.S.-based production and data-enhanced process design.
Zephyr AI
Website: https://www.zephyrai.bio/
Zephyr AI is a precision-medicine company unifying enterprise-scale real-world data with multi-modal AI to deliver actionable, biologically interpretable insights across the therapeutic lifecycle—from discovery to clinical deployment. Our software-native, AI-enabled modules predict drug response and reconstruct gene-expression signatures from clinically available DNA-based inputs and drug metadata, and can be fine-tuned to novel therapeutics or diagnostics. Pilots stand up in weeks, informing patient stratification, trial optimization, label expansion, and indication discovery.
Nexus, our SOC 2/HIPAA-aligned data and compute infrastructure, powers rapid cohort construction, synthetic control arms, and real-world validation with intervention-specific risk modeling. Through Aster Insights™ and the ORIEN Total Cancer Care® study, Zephyr provides access to deeply annotated oncology assets—lifetime-consented patients with linked clinical, exome, transcriptome, and whole-slide imaging—to enable fit-for-purpose data generation. We partner with biopharma, diagnostics, and digital-pathology leaders, integrating seamlessly into existing workflows with no new assays required. Together with a rigorous validation engine grounded in real-world outcomes, Zephyr bridges experimental and clinical domains to extract signal from heterogeneous data, de-risk development, and bring effective therapies to patients sooner. Our mission is to make precision medicine accessible and immediate—turning fragmented data into confident, patient-impacting decisions at scale.
Cytiva
Website: https://www.cytivalifesciences.com/about-us
Cytiva is a global life sciences leader dedicated to helping customers discover and commercialize the next generation of therapeutics. Together, we bring dedicated technical expertise and a broad portfolio of tools and technologies that enable the development, manufacture, and delivery of transformative medicines to patients. Visit cytiva.com to learn more.
Steve Gibson
Chief Commercial Officer
Strangeworks
Steve has held a range of C-Suite positions in technology companies ranging from financial technology services, to data science consulting. Currently he serves as Chief Commercial Officer at Strangeworks; an advanced compute platform as a service (PaaS) company based in Austin, Texas. Prior to Strangeworks, Steve helped build several startups from the ground up, the most successful being Honest Dollar which was the first startup acquired by Goldman Sachs in their 147 year history. Prior to Honest Dollar, Steve worked for a number of large multinational corporations in the European aerospace sector delivering platforms for military, civil and space applications. Steve holds a Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Systems Engineering from the University of Coventry in the UK.
Strangeworks
Website: https://strangeworks.com/
Strangeworks is on a mission to turn computational complexity into real world solutions. With the largest catalog of quantum and quantum-inspired computing resources on an innovative cloud platform backed by computational experts, we make the transformative potential of quantum computing accessible to all. Our AI powered workflows make it easier for enterprises to solve today’s toughest challenges, accelerate breakthroughs, and future-proof their operations. Partnering with customers worldwide, Strangeworks delivers immediate ROI while shaping a smarter, quantum-enabled future.
Helix AI
Website: https://helixai.com/
HelixAI is a specialist scientific technology company focused on accelerating research and development for biopharmaceutical organizations. Its platform, JarvisAI, enables scientific teams to design and execute in silico R&D workflows that support a wide range of operations from early-stage drug discovery to scale-up and bioproduction. By integrating scientific data from public, private and client domains along with computational models and AI-driven orchestration, JarvisAI helps researchers explore hypotheses more efficiently and prioritize the most promising drug candidates for further development. This approach supports better, faster decision-making combined with optimization of scientific and wet-lab resources.