The Biotech Startups Podcast

In this final episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast series, Jon Chee sits down with Mati Gill, CEO of AION Labs, to unpack where AI value is actually being created in biopharma—and what comes next. Mati lays out three pillars driving a post-hype phase of sustainable growth, explains why the industry is structurally conservative for good reasons, and shares how AION Labs is already preparing for the quantum computing wave before it arrives.

Jon Chee sits down with Mati Gill, CEO of AION Labs — an Israeli venture studio backed by AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer, Teva, AWS, and the Israel Biotech Fund. Mati breaks down how AION Labs builds AI-native pharma companies from the ground up: industry-grade problem statements, multidisciplinary teams, and pharma partner POC commitments locked in before a startup is formed.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Mati Gill, CEO of AION Labs. Mati traces his path from juggling a minister's bureau with Israeli law school to joining Teva as an intern with no private-sector experience, then learning a 45,000-person org from the chart up — until Teva's financial crisis handed him the mandate to build the innovation program that became AION Labs.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Mati Gill, CEO of AION Labs—a first-of-its-kind AI venture studio backed by Teva, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, and Amazon Web Services. Before AION Labs, Mati spent six years in the IDF, ran a minister's bureau, and rose from legal intern to global legal COO at Teva over more than a decade. Part one covers the formative years: moving from Columbus, Ohio to Jerusalem at 12, extending military service by three years, and the two teachers who handed him D's and changed how he works.

In part four, Alex Telford, founder of Convoke, covers the platform architecture and roadmap. He walks through Convoke's modular system—building validated structured datasets from trial registries, regulatory filings, and patents, then stitching them with workflow tools for competitive intelligence and document generation. He breaks down how pharma and biotech customers engage differently, why an "everything app" is a trap, and how Convoke is moving from reactive data storage toward proactive, predictive intelligence.