Lunch & Learn: The MOAT is the DATA: Building a Proprietary AI Platform Inside a Very Small Company
FREE Lunch & Learn seminar for members and the community.
Every founder is being told to use AI. Almost none of them can afford to build a model, and the tools everyone can buy give everyone the same answers. David Craig walks through how Sarcomatrix Therapeutics built SarcoVista, a proprietary artificial intelligence platform for muscle disease, on a foundation most companies overlook: two decades of experimental data that exists nowhere else. He covers why proprietary data is the asset and the model is the commodity, how a small company partners for architecture while keeping ownership of what matters, how machine predictions get tested against the laboratory rather than trusted on faith, and how a platform built this way becomes a second asset on the balance sheet alongside the drug programs. The examples come from drug development. The framework applies to any founder sitting on data they have not yet recognized as valuable.
David Craig is co-founder, president, and chief executive officer of Sarcomatrix Therapeutics Corporation, a preclinical rare neuromuscular disease company based at the Innevation Center, where he leads two therapeutic programs and the company's SarcoVista artificial intelligence platform. He brings thirty years of biopharmaceutical experience across Amgen, Sequus, Gilead Sciences, AcelRx, Portola Pharmaceuticals, and the University of Nevada, Reno licensing office, with work spanning drug development, commercialization, company building, and investing. He has been part of teams that brought EPOGEN, NEUPOGEN, HEPSERA, and ANDEXXA to patients. He is the author of The New Rules of Biotech: A Founder's Guide to Building Great Companies, and holds a B.S. in Pharmacy from South Dakota State University and an MBA from the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School.